True Blood star Joe Manganiello has claimed that he was once in line to play Jack Reacher – but suspects that his casting may have been blocked by Tom Cruise.
Manganiello, 49, who is also known for supporting part in Magic Mike, Spider-Man and How I Met Your Mother, alleged that studio executives had wanted him for the title role, but he ultimately lost out Smallville’s Alan Ritchson.
In a new memoir Bloodlines, Manganiello speculates that a mutual connection may have prompted Cruise to intervene: at the time, Manganiello was married to Modern Family star Sofia Vergara, who was rumoured to have had a brief relationship with Cruise back in 2005.
When he learned he had lost out on the role, Manganiello writes, his team speculated that Cruise, “an executive producer [on the show], could have potentially come in over the top and vetoed my being cast on account of Sofía.”
Cruise played ex-military vigilante Reacher, created by crime novelist Lee Child, in two films in 2012 and 2016. Prime Video subsequently developed its own serialised streaming adaptation of the character, titled Reacher.
“No one would tell me what the hell happened,” he added, conjecturing that Cruise may have nixed the casting “so maybe he wouldn’t want to have to deal with the association with me in perpetuity”.
There is, however, no evidence to substantiate the claim, and Cruise is not listed among the production credits on Reacher. Manganiello admits in the book that the idea was “all just speculation”.
The Independent has contacted a representative of Cruise for comment.
In his memoir, Manganiello claimed (per PageSix) that he met with Don Granger, an executive at Skydance Media, one of the companies producing Reacher, during the casting process in January 2020.
“We talked for an hour and a half,” Manganiello wrote, claiming that the conversation addressed “the backlash over Tom’s size”.
The backlash in question concerned Cruise’s casting in the Reacher film adaptations. In Child’s original books, Reacher is described as being 6ft 5”, nearly a full foot taller than Cruise, who stands at 5ft 7”.
Manganiello claims that he was told: “You are the closest thing to Jack Reacher that I’ve ever met in my entire life... You look like Reacher is described in the books... You have his effortless intelligence.”
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