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Joe Manganiello’s ancestry reveal included some shocking twists as the actor appeared on Finding Your Roots, the PBS genealogy docuseries.
A special screening in LA hosted on Sunday, January 15, revealed that the True Blood actor is 7% Sub-Saharan African and has never been related to anyone with the title 'Manganiello.'
On Joe’s maternal side, he has Armenian, Croatian, and German ancestry. His great-grandmother, Terviz "Rose" Darakjian, was a survivor of the Armenian genocide and his grandmother was born in a camp to a German soldier, Karl Wilhelm Beutinger, as unearthed by the PBS show.
The actor's father's half of the family were known to come from Italian roots. But Finding Your Roots uncovered that while his paternal grandmother is of Sicilian descent, Joe's legal grandfather, Emilio Manganiello, shared no biological connection with the actor. The 46-year-old's biological grandfather was a mixed-race African-American man, born to a black father and white mother.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Joe shared that the discoveries came as a shock, and noted:
“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'm descended from survivors": Joe Manganiello says that Finding Your Roots reveal is like "handing a pair of glasses"
Joe Manganiello, who was born to Susan Manganiello-Brachanow and Charlie Manganiello, grew up in Pittsburgh with an Armenian-Italian upbringing. His mother was a model and housewife who spent most of her life in Pennsylvania. Charlie, an electrical engineer, was brought up in Boston, but moved to Pittsburgh, where he married Susan. The couple had two sons together and are now separated.
Joe Manganiello knew about his German ancestry on his mother's side. However, the docuseries, which uses historical data and DNA analysis to piece together genealogy, was able to resolve the mystery of who Joe Manganiello's maternal great-grandfather actually was.
Rose, Joe's great-grandmother, escaped her village with her only surviving child during the Armenian genocide by pretending to be dead after her husband and seven children were shot. She then avoided death marches and swam across a river with the infant strapped to her back.
Although the infant drowned, Rose survived and hid in a cave until she was found by German soldiers and taken to a camp. There, she became pregnant from a German named Karl Wilhelm Beutinger. The duo's daughter, born at the camp, was Sarah Manganiello-Brachanow's mother.
The show also revealed that Karl returned to his wife and three sons back in Germany, the eldest of whom became a Nazi SS officer.
In a subsequent interview with Rolling Stones, Joe Manganiello noted that "it’s virtually impossible that [he] exist[s]," acknowledging his great-grandmother's bravery, and that he is aware that a family cannot always be on the right side of a war, noting that "you have to take the good with the bad."
Joe Manganiello's father, Charlie, prided himself on being a "full-blooded Italian" and celebrated his Sicilian roots, according to the actor. Finding Your Roots uncovered that the Magic Mike actor's paternal great-grandparents were William Henry Cutler (African-American) and Nellie Alton (Irish-American), an interracial couple from Rhode Island, and his biological grandfather was one of their three sons.
Manganiello admitted that a lot of things made sense after the reveal, including his father's complexion in the summer and why his grandfather always acted cold towards his son. The actor had earlier taken a 23andMe test, but had chalked up discrepancies such as his Irish and Black ancestry to his Sicilian heritage.
Henry Louis Gates, the show’s host, told Rolling Stone:
“If I have a short list of all-time greatest hits, Joe Manganiello’s paternal ancestry is on that list.”
Further, the actor’s biological grandfather’s family could be traced to a person named Plato Turner, enslaved from Africa as a child, who later became free and fought in the Revolutionary War against the British. Plato Turner is Joe Manganiello's fifth great-grandfather. A monument in his honor can be found in Plymouth, Mass.
The actor admitted that although everyone, including his wife Sofia Vergara, was shocked by the news, a lot of things fell into place after the reveal. He commented, "I’m descended from survivors," adding:
Much like the glasses I’m wearing, it feels like I’ve spent my whole life looking at myself in a mirror completely out of focus, and the show is like handing me a pair of glasses at age 46. All of a sudden I can see myself clearly for the first time.
The Finding Your Roots episode with Joe Manganiello will air on PBS in three weeks on Tuesday, February 7.
