Thursday, March 28, 2024

Actor Joe Manganiello Unpacks His Black-Slavery Ancestry with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Joe Manganiello
Joe Manganiello attends Metallica Presents: “The Helping Hands Concert” at Microsoft Theater on December 16, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

*“Magic Mike” star Joe Manganiello recently found out his paternal grandfather is a biracial man mixed with Black. 

Manganiello appears on an upcoming episode of “Finding Your Roots” and was shocked to discover that his paternal grandfather, an Italian man, isn’t related to him, The YBF reports. 

“My family and I had a betting pool of what it is, like what’s so bad that you can’t announce it on the episode?” Manganiello told a TV critics meeting last year, The Associated Press reports. The host of the PBS program, Henry Louis Gates Jr., informed Manganiello that his “grandfather was a Black man of mixed race,” said Manganiello.

“That was fascinating,” he added. 

The actor is speaking further about his genealogy in a new interview with Rolling Stone,

READ MORE: Joe Manganiello Learns His Biological Grandfather is Mixed Race Black Man

Joe Manganiello with braids (Facebook)
Joe Manganiello with braids (Facebook)

Here’s the backstory per the Rolling Stone report:

During his episode, Manganiello, 46, discovered that his great-grandmother Terviz “Rose” Darakjian, who escaped the Armenian genocide after her husband and seven of her eight children were murdered in front of her by Turks, ended up in a refugee camp where she was impregnated by Karl Wilhelm Beutinger, a German officer. Beutinger then returned to his wife and three sons in Germany, one of whom became a Nazi SS officer. Even more surprising, however, was his father’s side: Joe’s DNA did not match anyone with the “Manganiello” name, and the man he thought was his grandfather, Emilio Manganiello, was in fact not.

When Joe’s father submitted to DNA testing, Gates’ team determined that Joe’s biological great-grandparents were William Henry Cutler, who was Black, and Nellie Alton, who was white. They narrowed Joe’s grandfather down to one of three Cutler sons, all of whom were light-skinned African-American men. (Joe’s DNA revealed he’s 7% Sub-Saharan African.) Gates and co. also learned that Joe’s fifth great-grandfather was a man named Plato Turner. Records indicate Turner was born in Africa, brought to America in bondage as a child slave, became a free man, and was one of 5,000 Black men who fought for the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. There is a monument dedicated to him in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Below are excerpts from Joe’s RS interview. 

Going into Finding Your Roots, what were you expecting?

I had known since I was a kid about the Armenian genocide survivor story and that there was this German soldier who was my great-grandfather. For the past ten years, I’d been trying to get on a genealogy show to find out who that German was. I always got no. And about two years ago, we got a yes from Finding Your Roots because they felt that technology had gotten to the place where they might be able to make some headway.

Now, I then got a phone call that they needed to speak to me and that, for only the second time in the show’s history, they needed to give a subject the option of opting out on the episode. That happened. We went through with the episode, and once we filmed the episode, I had a lot of questions still. They directed me to a German historian in Europe, and I personally hired him to run down a bunch of questions that I had.  

And then you discovered that your great-grandfather’s name was Karl Wilhelm Beutinger, who after impregnating Rose returned to Germany to his wife and three children. And we learn that one of those children grew up be a Nazi SS officer during World War II. There’s this powerful moment in the episode where you discuss having family on both sides of a genocide — the perpetrators and the victims.

The idea that, yes, the oldest son was in the SS — which is not just regular military, that means you’re bought-in — and the younger son was a Nazi soldier. Through my talks with the family, it turns out that the younger son was sent to a Gulag, tortured for years, and returned speaking only Russian and didn’t recognize his children. What’s interesting is, I have a maternal and paternal grandfather who both fought during World War II for the United States. So once again, you have family members on opposite sides of a conflict. It’s really wild. I’m an avid watcher of Finding Your Roots, and when you’re an actor they say, ‘When someone criticizes you, you really can’t take that fully to heart; and when someone praises you, you can’t take that fully to heart.’ You have to take the good with the bad. And there’s some of that with history. I think there’s a tendency to say, ‘I’m so proud that my ancestors were on the right side of history,’ but that’s not you — that’s somebody else. My roommate in drama school is a very famous cantor at a synagogue in San Francisco, and he’s one of my favorite people in the world. It’s not me, you know?

Let’s move to your father’s side. This isn’t in the episode, but Gates told me your father would get very dark in the summertime and people would make jokes about it, and that your grandfather was cold to your father. How did Finding Your Roots fill in those gaps?

People went to their grave with family secrets that Finding Your Roots was able to basically exhume. It was a real shock. To find out that your last name isn’t really your last name, and that I was related to zero percent of the world’s Manganiello’s is… wow. I can’t imagine what it must be like for my father to find that out at age 72, and anything I feel seems borderline inconsequential. I’ve never understood what ground zero was for me — or who I am. If you put me in a lineup of Italian people, I don’t really fit in. You can tell that I’m mixed with something else. When I saw the picture of the German officer who’s my great-grandfather, I look more like him than anyone else in my family. My father would get super dark in the summertime. People would always ask me, “Does your father look like Tom Selleck?” and I’d say, “No. Honestly, in the summertime my father looks more like O.J. Simpson” — or even the late Franco Harris. It makes sense now that we know. Much of my father’s identity was rooted in the fact that he was full-blooded Italian — or F.B.I., as they call it — and there’s a strong sense of that identity growing up in the ethnic neighborhoods of Boston.

How did this information land for your father and the rest of your family?

I don’t know. My father and I… we’re not… my father and I don’t talk, so I can’t speak to that. For me, it’s fascinating — to know what I am, to be able to explore ground zero. I love history and storytelling, and it’s part of the reason why I picked my profession. I’m grateful. The reveal on the episode took seven hours, which is way longer than it usually takes, and my mother and her sister and my cousin all watched via Zoom as it was all revealed, and I know it was really emotional for them to hear all the stories and face the truth.

Read the full conversation here

Manganiello’s “Finding Your Roots” episode is set to air on Feb. 9 on PBS.

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