With a budding film and stage career, “True Blood” werewolf Joe Manganiello transitions to leading man
- Last Updated: 6:43 PM, August 27, 2013
- Posted: 5:48 PM, August 27, 2013
Don't get him wrong — Joe Manganiello is happy and grateful to play Alcide, the preternaturally buff werewolf pack leader on HBO’s hit series “True Blood.” It’s just, well, “Sometimes all I’m being asked to do is rip my shirt off and growl,” says the classically trained actor with a BFA from Carnegie Mellon with a touch of rue. “Honestly, it’s been tricky,” he continues, “because this past year, I've been shooting one or two scenes an episode, which means I’m acting two or three days a month. It’s easy to not feel like an actor. I have to get my creativity out somehow.”
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A glance at the guy’s sculpted shoulders will tell you how determined he can be. So it’s no surprise that his creativity is popping out all over. He’s been after his manager to find him a David Mamet or Tennessee Williams play to do. She delivered — from Sept. 20 to Oct. 12 he'll star as Stanley Kowalski in Yale Repertory Theatre’s first-ever production of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Streetcar Named Desire,” directed by Mark Rucker. Manganiello, who is 36, has played the role before, at the West Virginia Public Theatre in 2008, “so I know the play inside and out,” he says. “But I’m excited to check in and see where I’m at now as a person, what’s going to get pulled out from me this time.”
It’s his favorite play, he continues: “Everyone knows someone like these characters — the aging beauty, the abused spouse and this Jungian shadow form of a man. You don’t agree with the choices they make, but you get it. And what’s really amazing, on any given night, it depends on the performance as to who the audience is going to side with. There’s so much talk now about how the protagonists on cable TV are anti-heroes who live in a gray area, be it Don Draper on ‘Mad Men’ or Walter White on ‘Breaking Bad.’ People talk about this as if it’s some kind of new thing, but Tennessee Williams did it in 1947, and I think did it better than anybody. Stanley Kowalski is still the quintessential, top-of-the-mountain male role in American drama.”
For many, the quintessential Kowalski remains Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s film, but Manganiello is a confident guy; he’s not concerned with anyone else’s interpretation. “Am I intimidated? Not at all. I want it to be mine,” he says.
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