Joe Manganiello

 ( Official Website ) 

In the February 7, 2023, episode of PBS series Finding Your Roots, the researchers uncovered that Manganiello's legal paternal grandfather, Emilio Manganiello, was not his biological grandfather, and that his biological great-grandparents were an African-American man named William Henry Cutler and a white woman named Nellie Alton. His biological paternal grandfather was one of Cutler and Alton's three mixed-race African-American sons. Using this information, researchers traced Manganiello's paternal lineage back to his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Plato Turner, an African slave who was freed before slavery was abolished in Massachusetts and who went on to fight for the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Manganiello's maternal great-grandmother, Terviz "Rose" Darakjian, was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, where her husband and seven of her children were killed. Darakjian's eighth child, an infant, drowned during Darakjian's escape across the Euphrates River. Darakjian later encountered Karl Wilhelm Beutinger, a German soldier, in an internment camp for survivors. Rose became pregnant by him. Beutinger soon left to return to Germany. He resumed his life there with his German wife and children, and never saw Rose Darakjian again. Manganiello's grandmother is the child of Beutinger and Rose Darakjian.

He has a younger brother, Nicholas. Raised Catholic, was a student at St. Bernard School, a Catholic elementary school in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania and then attended Mt. Lebanon High School, where he graduated with honors in 1995 and won the school's Great Alumni Award in 2011. Growing up, he was the captain of his football, basketball, and volleyball teams and went on to play at the varsity level in all three sports. He won the role of Jud Fry in his school's senior year production of Oklahoma! and was involved with the school's TV studio. He would borrow equipment in order to write and direct films with his friends, which eventually inspired him to begin studying acting.

Manganiello suffered a series of sports injuries through high school, including a torn medial collateral ligament while returning a kickoff in a varsity football game against Ringgold High School. The time off allowed Manganiello to reevaluate his future and so he decided to audition for the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama during his senior year. He was not accepted, so he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh and worked over the next year in the theater. He then reapplied to Carnegie Mellon a year later, and was awarded a scholarship, accepted into the acting program that year. There he performed in theater productions and wrote, produced, and acted in a student film entitled Out of Courage 2: Out for Vengeance. He graduated in 2000 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in acting. He then traveled to New York City and Los Angeles through his university to participate in group auditions, which provided him contacts in the entertainment business including an agent, a manager, and a screen test for Sam Raimi's Spider-Man.