“I feel like I’ve only really started,” says Jacinto. Louis Vuitton vest and trousers. Photographed by Emman Montalvan, Vogue Man Philippines, October 2024.
It’s finally time for Manny Jacinto, and he’s hoping to bring more Filipino stories to Hollywood.
Manny Jacinto is going through changes.
There’s the way the Filipino-Canadian actor quietly snuck in, during Rodent Man Summer, a season seemingly engineered to celebrate white men with floppy ears and toothy smiles. He unexpectedly grabbed the crown of Internet Boyfriend, a stealth contender to the throne by way of his turn as the darkly seductive baddie on the Star Wars series The Acolyte.
There’s the way that hard-earned breakout success seems to have emboldened the actor, speaking out about the ways Hollywood continues to fail people of color.
And then, there’s the fact that he turned 37 in the same summer, celebrating with a boodle fight and buko pandan, as any good Filipino boy would. The actor who so gamely and superbly played the male ingenue in projects like the hit NBC sitcom The Good Place and the Nicole Kidman series Nine Perfect Strangers is growing out of that archetype, just as his work in The Acolyte teases just how much more there is to his talent.
There’s a lot of exciting, head-spinning change in Manny Jacinto’s life. But today, the thing that’s pulling focus in the actor’s mind are the changes happening to his beloved dog Henri, an American Bully he adopted with his partner, actor Dianne Doan, during the pandemic.
“She’s kind of on her last legs,” Jacinto tells me, on a Zoom call from his Los Angeles home. “She’s 10 now and she’s lived a good life but now, it’s just, the decline…” he says, trailing off. “But it’s life.”
“One of the very first lessons I learned when I started acting was the idea of impermanence,” he tells me. “It won’t do you any good trying to hold onto something, whether it be money or fame or certain highlights in your career. You’re going to have to keep moving past it.”
When The Acolyte came out last June, Jacinto had already been a working actor for 12 years. To the audiences, he was already a known quantity, turning heads as the loveably ditzy Jason Mendoza on The Good Place and then successfully parlaying that to roles co-starring Hollywood heavyweights like Melissa McCarthy and Michael Shannon. Still, despite all those triumphs, the response to his The Acolyte character Qimir (later revealed to be The Stranger) was something else entirely.
Overnight, Jacinto was suddenly everywhere this summer, inspiring fancams on TikTok, breathless commentary in the media and more thirsty tweets than a BuzzFeed video could accommodate. The reason for that adulation? A scene in The Acolyte where Jacinto’s character is seen stripping down—the sunlight accentuating his taut muscles, as Disney+’s audio description so thirstily puts it—and bathing in a hot spring, while Amandla Stenberg’s Osha breathlessly looks on.
“Luckily, I’m not on TikTok,” Jacinto says, laughing. “But yeah, it has been weird. I have gotten those comments from friends or family where they’re like, ‘You’re popping up everywhere on my Explore page.’”
In a year where audiences’ attention was so thoroughly dominated by Caucasian actors like Josh O’Connor and Jeremy Allen White, an Asian man had suddenly become the object of the Internet’s attention, especially significant in an industry where diversity is still woefully limited. In the past, roles for Asian men in Hollywood have largely been relegated to comedic relief and stereotypical kung-fu-fighting action roles. But Jacinto is part of a generation that has managed to flip the script, counting among them stars Steven Yeun and Charles Melton.
“It feels like a natural pivot to produce… and that’s what I’m finding myself doing in some of these projects that I’m trying to get off the ground.”
“[When I was growing up] you couldn’t help but see in the media that Asian males weren’t the romantic leads,” he says. “If anything, they can be action stars. But in the case of [the Jet Li-Aaliyah starrer] Romeo Must Die, you can be the action star, but still not kiss the girl.”
In his case, Jacinto often does get to kiss the girl. But even with that, typecasting is still typecasting and while Jacinto understands the subtly subversive work he’s doing as an Asian man playing pin-up roles in Hollywood, he dreams of work that isn’t just reliant on his physicality.
“I talk to my team about this all the time. I’m like, ‘Is it a role where I don’t have to take my shirt off? Because that’d be great,’” he says. “I think there’s this fear of being typecast as the guy that always takes his shirt off in his roles. In that sense, it can be frustrating.”
The Acolyte then is an answered prayer for the actor, a project that harnesses Jacinto’s formidable physical gifts—those piercing eyes, that jawline you could grate a block of manchego on—while at the same time allowing him to reveal previously unseen depths as an actor.
In the press surrounding The Acolyte’s release, Jacinto has made sure to credit series creator Leslye Headland for having the imagination and the daring to put him in the role. “I just feel so lucky because I don’t know if anybody else would’ve hired me in something like this,” he says. “Working with Leslye was the first time where I felt, ‘This is a creative collaboration’ from the start. She gave me that. She trusted me with being able to give my own input.”
That support is what allowed Jacinto to knock the role out of the park. But more importantly, it has informed how he’s looking at his career moving forward, encouraging him to start having more agency in his work. “It feels like a natural pivot to produce—to be a creative producer—and that’s what I’m finding myself doing in some of these projects that I’m trying to get off the ground.”
Last year, Jacinto went back to the Philippines for the first time in 12 years, to celebrate the holidays with the family they still have in the country. “We were in Makati,” he says. “My dad’s side, a lot of his family’s still in Davao, some people are in Bulacan. My mom’s side is in Gapan.”
That overdue trip to the homeland has fueled Jacinto’s desire to find projects that speak to his culture. “That was a huge inspiration for me to tell more Filipino stories,” he says. “I feel like I’ve only really started.”
In the last few years, Jacinto has started taking it upon himself to reach out to like-minded talent to see what they can work on together. Tellingly, it’s Filipino-American talent that’s on the top of that list. His big dream? Making a Filipino Minari, the Lee Isaac Chung film, or the Filipino version of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell.
He’s especially keen to work with Dolly de Leon, the Golden Globe-nominated breakout star of Ruben Östlund’s Cannes winner Triangle of Sadness, and Isabel Sandoval, the buzzy auteur behind the Venice Film Festival hit Lingua Franca.
“Fingers crossed, I get to work with Dolly,” he tells me excitedly. “We’re trying to work something out, maybe a little mother-son relationship type of thing. Dolly is an incredible talent, and I would love nothing more to be able to work with her.”
“With Isabel, we talked and just sang each other’s praises. I think more so me to her,” he says. “I would love to be able to do something with her, but we have yet to find something. But I’m always cheering her on for everything that she’s directing or creating. She’ll always have a fan in me.”
Visibly excited, Jacinto continues: “I mean, we’ll put it out there! Put it out there that we can collaborate on something. Because for one thing, she has such a beautiful eye for storytelling, and she has so much to tell.”
Later, Jacinto cracks: “I think the thing is that I’d have to work on my Tagalog,” he says, laughing. “I wish they had Tagalog in Duolingo, to be honest. That would help a lot.”
Up next, he’s appearing with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in Freakier Friday, the much-anticipated sequel to the 2003 classic, playing the love interest to Lohan’s character Anna. But after that? It’s anyone’s guess. “The guiding light for now is projects where I can lead the story, just anything where I’m pushing the story as opposed to just supporting it.”
As soon as he says that, Jacinto starts backing up, talking about how uncomfortable he is about saying that. But then he catches himself. “I have this almost self-consciousness to say those words out loud, which is weird to me,” he tells me. “Something about saying ‘I want to be a leading man’ is daunting or scary. But if you don’t believe in it, then nobody else is going to believe in that. So I have to say that. I have to say that out loud.”
“That’s the goal,” he says, a glint in his eye. “We’ll try and get there.”
By RAYMOND ANG. Photographs by EMMAN MONTALVAN Styling by SUE CHOI.Vogue Man Editor DANYL GENECIRAN. Grooming: Kimberly Bragalone for Exclusive Artists. Executive Producers: Anz Hizon, Tiffany Bloomfield. Set Designer: Priscilla Lee. Producer: Joy Marie Thomas, Karely Perez Cruz. Photographer’s Assistants: Justin Brooks, Patrick Molina. Stylist’s Assistant: Cara Catabay. Digital Tech: Maria Noble. Equipment Rental House + Studio: Primo Studios.
