Manny Jacinto Is Not Your Handsome Dope: 'I Love Proving People Wrong'

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'Freakier Friday' co-star Manny Jacinto is the love interest Millennial moms need this summer. But his chiseled jawline is just one reason why.
The shirt was a poly-blend boa constrictor—jet-black with tourniquets for sleeves. It was giving Danny Zuko from Grease! or Johnny Castle from Dirty Dancing … if either of those guys shopped in the children's section of Target.
Manny Jacinto was worried it would send the wrong message. Sure, he was playing the DILF in a hotly-anticipated summer rom-com opposite Lindsay Lohan. But this was a family-friendly movie produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Surely, that company has some standards to uphold, no?
So Jacinto asked Nisha Ganatra, the director of said film, Freakier Friday, if his costume for a scene in which his and Lohan's characters are taking a dancing lesson was inappropriate.
She told him it was perfect.
Jacinto may have questioned it, but that shirt could be a metaphor for his career: Hook the audience with cheekbones and chest muscles, then keep them there with charisma.
Despite his bachelor's degree in civil engineering and his work as a competitive hip hop dancer (cards on the table: The Freakier Friday dance scene was Jacinto's brain child), the actor's breakout role was playing the ultimate Florida Man, Jason Mendoza, on the Kristen Bell-fronted NBC comedy The Good Place. This led to parts like the maybe-too-zen-to-be-believed Yao in Nine Perfect Strangers, Hulu's dismantling of the wellness industrial complex starring Nicole Kidman, and the mysterious Qimir in The Acolyte, the first female-centric Star Wars series for Disney+.
Although he does do more macho work—all of his lines were famously cut from Top Gun: Maverick and he just wrapped the Old West comedy The Stalemate—Jacinto will happily concede that he owes his career to women-led stories. 'Women have been a huge champion for me. It's always been women who have been able to look past what I have done and see the potential of what I can do,' he says, name-checking Kidman, Ganatra, and The Acolyte's Leslye Headland. 'Thank God I get to do this during this day and age when there are so many women at the top … who see my potential and are not afraid to explore that.'
By this point in his career, Jacinto knows both what's expected of him and how to still surprise us. 'I love proving people wrong,' he says.
Freakier Friday hits theaters August 8 and is a long-awaited sequel to the 2003 Jamie Lee Curtis-Lindsay Lohan comedy Freaky Friday about the mother-daughter duo Tess and Anna who get stuck in each other's bodies. Jacinto will certainly win hearts as Eric Davies, the dashingly charming British chef and single dad, who is engaged to Lohan's Anna. Anna has her own teenager, and—the stakes needing to be ever higher in a sequel—the two girls along with Anna and Tess undergo a bizarre quadruple body swap right under Eric's nose.
Jacinto is not British; the fake accent is part of his charm offensive. ('I apologize to all of the U.K. readers,' he quips.) And Jacinto admits that it was a bit of a gut punch that, at 37, he's hit the age at which he can believably be cast as the father of someone old enough to apply for a learner's permit. But he sells us on the idea that Eric is a guy for whom Anna would uproot her life and move herself and her child to another country.
After years of playing the comic relief or interesting side character, Jacinto has convinced audiences (and casting directors) that he can be not just a leading man, but one who is confident enough in his own abilities to step aside and let the women get the laughs.
'I'm not gonna lie; I love dunking the ball,' Jacinto says. 'Getting the ball and getting to shoot and make people laugh … but another reason why this character appealed to me was just [to show that] I can be the heart of this story. I can be the straight man.'
Sipping on an Arnold Palmer while reclining in an untucked blue button-down and baggy jeans, Jacinto seems relaxed but not aloof. He's attentive to my needs, insisting on buying my Topo Chico and moving my recorder closer to him when decibels rise in the bustling north Los Angeles coffee shop where we're meeting. But his cadence remains even; his voice staying below any octave that would draw attention to himself. 'It's wild that I get to do this. I never would have thought I'd play the love interest to Lindsay Lohan; I watched Lindsay Lohan as a kid,' he says with genuine awe. 'It's wild what you can do if you put your mind to it.'
After The Good Place, Jacinto says he was offered roles similar to the adorable meathead he played in that comedy, but that the 'good looking dope thing—it's never comfortable for me.' He loves that Freakier Friday, which he describes as a celebration of Lohan's work in its predecessor as well as The Parent Trap (1998), lets him plumb other ranges of comedy. (Judging by the end-of-film outtakes, a lot of improv was involved.)
Initially, Jacinto's role wasn't as central to the story, but it grew as the creatives realized what a gold mine they had in the actor. 'He is just one of those rare artists that can do this earnestness that you believe,' Ganatra, the director, tells me. 'He can do comedy and he can do drama and when I realized the breadth of his talent, we just kept asking him to do more and more and more.'
Just as the first film kept Anna's incoming step-dad (Mark Harmon) in the dark, Jacinto's character is never made aware that his fiancée has swapped places with her daughter, though he does sense that there's something amiss. Even more complicated than Harmon's tight-rope walk is that Jacinto also had to play that he doesn't know his own daughter and his future mother-in-law have switched bodies, too.
'He does the perfect look away at the right moment, or look into their eyes in the right moment, where you see that he kind of knows something's wrong, but he's just trying to keep everyone happy,' Ganatra says. 'And I think he ends up stealing your heart at the end of the movie, because he is just trying so hard to buoy everybody up. Manny has a lot of that in him; he has a big, huge heart.'
Now, if we're being fair, Jacinto isn't the only eye candy that Freakier Friday serves up to the Millennials in the audience. Chad Michael Murray, who played Anna's boyfriend Jake in the first film, is back for the sequel, too. And Ganatra also makes the most of his scenes, such as a slow-mo exit from a motorcycle that includes a helmet removal and casual hair toss.
'I think I even had a crush on Chad Michael Murray when I was younger,' Jacinto says, laughing off any potential #TeamJake versus #TeamEric wars brewing within the fandom. Off-screen, the two bonded over their shared love of fitness. 'He had some amino acid protein powder,' Jacinto says. 'I was like, This is my guy…We're gonna be best friends.'
Of his own looks, Jacinto seems both nonchalant and ambivalent. Ganatra tells me that she had to sequester her actor to his own tent between takes of a beach scene because the crew couldn't stop staring. But Jacinto says he pitched the Freakier Friday dance scene not so much to show off as because he felt he might as well get it on camera now 'while my lower back is still functioning.'
'There's nothing like knowing that you might be shirtless on-screen to motivate you to hit the gym,' he jokes.
Jacinto still takes dance classes on his off time; just that morning ​​he tried to con his wife, Grey's Anatomy and The Descendants actress Dianne Doan, into joining him at one. But even when he's mastering a skill, he questions if he could be learning something more.
'I had a conversation with a few friends the other night about how I can't read fiction because in the back of my head I'm like, I could be learning something, I could be doing something more productive,' he admits. 'But the point of reading fiction, or watching TV, or watching movies, is to just be in the moment and to enjoy the art.'
So his immediate goals are along those lines. He and Doan are planning to travel to Japan. He's in the process of producing a Filipino story that he's passionate about. Although The Acolyte only lasted a season, Jacinto says he's keen to do more franchise work. He likes a challenge, so he's up for acting in a different language ('I speak French and a little Tagalog'). Perhaps try to do a musical? 'Dirty Dancing 2,' he jokes, 'that's the long game.' In earnestness, though, Jacinto feels he's just getting started. And whatever route he takes next, he's certain, like any good Disney Prince, to enchant audiences all along the way.Credits
Photographer
Ryan Pfluger
Stylist
Ilaria Urbinati
Grooming
Kim Bragalone using Kypris Beauty and Bumble and Bumble at Redefine Representation
Set Stylist
Amy Jo Diaz
Styling Assistants
Rajina Dusara & Rum Brady
Location
1 Hotel West HollywoodRead the original article on InStyle
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