Joe Manganiello Wiki, Biography
Joe Manganiello’s ancestry reveals included some shocking twists when the actor appeared on Finding Your Roots, the PBS genealogy docuseries. A special Los Angeles screening hosted on Sunday, January 15 revealed that the True Blood actor is 7% sub-Saharan African and has never been related to anyone with the title ‘Manganiello’.
On Joe’s maternal side, he is of Armenian, Croatian, and German ancestry. His great-grandmother, Terviz “Rose” Darakjian, was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide and his grandmother was born in a camp to a German soldier, Karl Wilhelm Beutinger, the PBS show found out.
It was known that half of the actor’s father’s family came from Italian roots. But Finding Your Roots found that while Joe’s paternal grandmother is of Sicilian descent, Joe’s legal grandfather, Emilio Manganiello, shared no biological connection with the actor. The 46-year-old man’s biological grandfather was a mixed-race African-American man, born to a black father and a white mother.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Joe shared that the discoveries surprised him, noting:
“Finding out that your last name isn’t really your last name, and that I was related to zero percent of the Manganiellos in the world is… wow.” “I’m a descendant of survivors”: Joe Manganiello says Finding Your Roots reveals is like “hand over a pair of glasses”
Joe Manganiello, the son of Susan Manganiello-Brachanow and Charlie Manganiello, grew up in Pittsburgh with an Armenian-Italian upbringing. His mother was a model and homemaker who spent most of her life in Pennsylvania. Charlie, an electrical engineer, grew up in Boston but moved to Pittsburgh, where he married Susan. The couple had two children together and are now separated.
Joe Manganiello knew of his German ancestry from his mother’s side. However, the docuseries, which uses historical data and DNA analysis to reconstruct genealogy, was able to solve the mystery of who Joe Manganiello’s maternal great-grandfather really was.
Rose, Joe’s great-grandmother, fled her village with her only surviving child during the Armenian genocide by pretending to be dead after her husband and her seven children were shot. She then avoided the death marches and swam across a river with the baby strapped to her back.
Although the girl drowned, Rose survived and hid in a cave until German soldiers found her and brought her to a camp. She there she became pregnant by a German named Karl Wilhelm Beutinger. The duo’s daughter, born at the camp, was the mother of Sarah Manganiello-Brachanow.
The show also revealed that Karl returned with his wife and their three children to Germany, the eldest of whom became a Nazi SS officer.
In a later interview with Rolling Stones, Joe Manganiello noted that “it’s virtually impossible for [him] to exist,” acknowledging his great-grandmother’s bravery, and that he’s aware that a family can’t always be on the right side of a war, noting that “you have to take the good with the bad”.
Joe Manganiello’s father, Charlie, prided himself on being a “full-blooded Italian” and celebrated his Sicilian roots, according to the actor. Finding Your Roots found that the Magic Mike actor’s paternal great-grandparents were William Henry Cutler (African-American) and Nellie Alton (Irish-American), an interracial couple from Rhode Island, and his biological grandfather was one of their three children.
Manganiello admitted that a lot of things made sense after the reveal, including his father’s complexion in the summer and why his grandfather always acted cold towards his son. The actor had previously taken a test for 23andMe, but had attributed discrepancies such as his Irish and black ancestry to his Sicilian heritage.
Henry Louis Gates, the show’s host, told Rolling Stone:
“If I have a short list of the greatest hits of all time, Joe Manganiello’s paternal ancestry is on that list.”
Additionally, the actor’s biological grandfather’s family can be traced back to a person named Plato Turner, enslaved in Africa when he was a child, who later broke free and fought in the Revolutionary War against the British. Plato Turner is the fifth great-grandfather of Joe Manganiello. A monument in his honor can be found in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The actor admitted that although everyone, including his wife Sofía Vergara, was shocked by the news, a lot fell into place after the revelation. He commented: “I am a descendant of survivors,” adding:
Like the glasses I wear, it feels like I’ve spent my entire life looking at myself in a mirror completely out of focus, and the spectacle is like giving myself a pair of glasses at 46. Suddenly, I can see myself clearly for the first time.