When asked to list a few of his favorite leading men, Manny Jacinto has no problem rattling off names: Dev Patel, Pedro Pascal, Steven Yeun, his childhood favorite, Keanu Reeves. “Guys who have not only done great work, but have created work for themselves—those are the guys that I aspire to be,” says Jacinto, looking summery in a white T-shirt and baseball cap while sitting in front of a sunny window in his California home.
For a long time, Jacinto—a Canadian actor born in the Philippines—didn’t consider himself a part of this coalition. Why? “I mean, the lack of people that looked like me when I was growing up,” he says with a shrug. “Even to this day, it’s still not that easy to see people who look like me who are leading men.”
After playing lovable, dim-witted Jason Mendoza on NBC’s The Good Place from 2016 to 2020, Jacinto did more supporting work in the first season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, as well as comedic indies like I Want You Back and Cora Bora. He was largely cut from 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, a move that rankled legions of Jacinto fans. “Especially within the Filipino community, so many families go into the Navy and are super proud,” he says now. “And I think they want to be represented as well.”
Both successes and setbacks reinforced Jacinto’s idea that he’d never quite be cast as the main character. “You start to ingrain ideas of what the world is supposed to be. So when there aren’t that many guys who look like me in media,” he says, “there’s this innate feeling—this negative talk that’s constantly in my head like, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this. This is stupid. This isn’t worth fighting for.’”
That all changes in Freakier Friday, a sequel to 2003’s Freaky Friday that reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as body-swapping mother Tess and daughter Anna. Jacinto plays Eric, the widowed British chef Anna falls for—and, as luck would have it, the father of Lily (Sophia Hammons), the teenage archnemesis of Anna’s daughter Harper (Julia Butters). “Man, am I that old now?” the 37-year-old actor thought upon receiving the role. “I was having a bit of a midlife crisis. But I have gotten to that point where I can play a young dad, so it was eye-opening. I’m not a father in real life yet, but it was good practice. It could take a couple more years.”
Like millions of millennials, Jacinto grew up watching Lohan’s movies. But when he revisited Freaky Friday as an adult, he realized something: “This did not age well,” says Jacinto. Alongside director Nisha Ganatra, he saw Freakier Friday as an opportunity to right “hurtful stereotypes” of the Asian community that appear in the 2003 movie. “That was the first thing that we talked about. We wanted to make sure that we don’t follow those same tropes and have some cultural respect,” he says. “I had nothing but trust that we would stay away from those stereotypes.”
The sequel ups the ante by conjuring a four-way body switch involving Anna, Tess, Harper, and Lily. Jacinto’s Eric is meant to be the calm in that storm. “You just wanted to find a husband character that felt grounded, that has heart, with those small moments of comedy sprinkled in,” he says. “It was a huge compliment that [Ganatra] would trust me, because I didn’t know if I believed that myself.”
“I felt like he’s a sneaky performance,” says Ganatra. “He did this to me on The Good Place. I was like, oh, who’s that cute kind of guy? He’s a bit dense, but got such a big heart that comes out on screen that you just root for him. I think that’s a quality you have as an actor or you don’t. When I saw him, I just thought, whoa, he can do so much more than is being asked of him in so many ways.”
Gantra tells VF that some of Hugh Grant’s romantic leads served as inspiration for Jacinto’s swoony, but necessarily obtuse character. “It’s so tricky what Manny pulls off because he has to not be so out of it and unintelligent that he doesn’t realize something’s off, but he has not not blow up the whole movie,” she explains. “We kind of landed on [the idea] that he has to be so in love with Anna that he’s willing to overlook all these things or write them off as quirks, the way we do with red flags in a relationship.”
Jacinto and Lohan anchor some of the film’s biggest comedic swings—like a scene where Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman gives them dance lessons using an exaggerated Australian accent. “Lindsay and I, at some points, forgot to act. We had the hard part of trying to keep up with Chloe,” he says. “It’s such a ridiculous scene that you can do anything, and Nisha was all for it. Let’s go as ridiculous as we can, and we can pull it back or cut it. I was down. Lindsay was down. It’s so much easier to do that when you have cast members who are willing to look ridiculous.”
That was also the mandate for a scene where Anna and Eric meet with an immigration officer (Santina Muha) who breaks into an impromptu rendition of “Tubthumping” by Chubawamba. That exchange could have gone even further, says Jacinto: “There was actually a scene that got cut where the whole immigration office was singing, ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again.’ It was hilarious.”
While a then 16-year-old Lohan made Freaky Friday, Jacinto came of age in British Columbia—“just microwaving popcorn, watching cartoons, playing video games all day,” he says. “I myself wouldn’t want my own kids to be in the spotlight until a much older age, until they really experienced the real world. To have a whole movie on your back? That’s a crazy amount of pressure. Just studying for exams was enough for me.”
Jacinto describes his adolescence under the watchful eye of his immigrant parents as relatively breezy. “I wasn’t too much of a troublemaker. I also went to an all-guys high school, so I didn’t have distractions,” he says. “Then I was just completely lost in college, could not concentrate because there was this opposite sex around me.”
I ask what a body-swap between Jacinto and one of his parents might entail. “I would probably switch with my dad and just experience how hard he worked,” he says. “I probably wouldn’t have lasted a day, because he was getting up at 4:30 in the morning—no complaints—coming home at 7 at night. I would’ve just quit. But he went through it for his family.”
Jacinto didn’t need to trade places with his parents to inherit their work ethic. “I just have this stubbornness about me where I need to find the next thing. It can be a problem sometimes, because I have a hard time relaxing,” says Jacinto, “I’m always like, ‘no, I need to learn a language.’ It’s just the idea that this could all go in a blink of an eye.” He trails off. “I should probably talk to my therapist about it.”
Jacinto credits last year’s Disney+ series The Acolyte, created by Leslye Headland, with jumpstarting his next career chapter. “Leslye gave me permission to not only just be myself on screen, but also know that me, as Manny, is enough to be a leading man,” he says. “Even to this day, I have this cautiousness toward associating my name with ‘leading man.’ But going through that project, speaking with Leslye, I was like, Yeah, I can do it. Let’s not run away from it. She truly gave me that power—that idea that I can embody the scope of what a leading man is. It became more of a reality.”
Jacinto feels a little more conflicted about being labeled one of the internet’s many boyfriends. “It’s so nice, but also to embrace that gives me the ick,” says Jacinto. “Growing up, I despised those dudes who kind of knew that they got it going on. It just didn’t feel authentic to me. It’s such an interesting dance. I also would love to do things that aren’t necessarily centered around being a love interest. I want to do work that is weird. I don’t want to be just that.”
He next stars in Love Language, a Nancy Meyers–esque romcom centered on Chloë Grace Moretz as a professional vow writer who gets entangled in her own real-life love triangle with Jacinto and In the Heights’s Anthony Ramos. Then he’s off to The Stalemate, which Jacinto describes as an “absurdist comedy Western” that has him going toe-to-toe with Ben Foster. “It felt like we were making something incredibly special,” he says, adding with a smile, “Who knows? It might be garbage.”
Jacinto is tight-lipped about other future projects, but he knows what he wants from them. “The ideas that have been resonating with me are definitely more slice-of-life, lighthearted, in the vein of Little Miss Sunshine and The Farewell—all these quirky family members coming together over a certain event,” he says. “It’s definitely Filipino-centric. Stepping into the role of producer is that natural next step.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
Exclusive: Inside the Celebrity Boat Trip That Was All Over Your Feeds
-
The Heartbreaking Love Story of Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson
-
What’s Going On With Marjorie Taylor Greene?
-
The Demise of a Hamptons Dream
-
George Clooney and Adam Sandler, Together at Last
-
Paramount’s Fiery Backlash
-
When Hollywood Almost Killed James Baldwin
-
What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison
-
How Princess Diana Became a Fashion Icon
-
From the Archive: Dating Jeffrey Epstein
The post With Freakier Friday, Manny Jacinto Becomes a Reluctant Leading Man appeared first on Vanity Fair.
