Joe Manganiello leads the pack

Don’t get him wrong — Joe Manganiello is happy and grateful to play Alcide, the preternaturally buff werewolf pack leader on HBO’s hit series “True Blood.” It’s just, well, “Sometimes all I’m being asked to do is rip my shirt off and growl,” says the classically trained actor with a BFA from Carnegie Mellon with a touch of rue. “Honestly, it’s been tricky,” he continues, “because this past year, I’ve been shooting one or two scenes an episode, which means I’m acting two or three days a month. It’s easy to not feel like an actor. I have to get my creativity out somehow.”

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A glance at the guy’s sculpted shoulders will tell you how determined he can be. So it’s no surprise that his creativity is popping out all over. He’s been after his manager to find him a David Mamet or Tennessee Williams play to do. She delivered — from Sept. 20 to Oct. 12 he’ll star as Stanley Kowalski in Yale Repertory Theatre’s first-ever production of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Streetcar Named Desire,” directed by Mark Rucker. Manganiello, who is 36, has played the role before, at the West Virginia Public Theatre in 2008, “so I know the play inside and out,” he says. “But I’m excited to check in and see where I’m at now as a person, what’s going to get pulled out from me this time.”

It’s his favorite play, he continues: “Everyone knows someone like these characters — the aging beauty, the abused spouse and this Jungian shadow form of a man. You don’t agree with the choices they make, but you get it. And what’s really amazing, on any given night, it depends on the performance as to who the audience is going to side with. There’s so much talk now about how the protagonists on cable TV are anti-heroes who live in a gray area, be it Don Draper on ‘Mad Men’ or Walter White on ‘Breaking Bad.’ People talk about this as if it’s some kind of new thing, but Tennessee Williams did it in 1947, and I think did it better than anybody. Stanley Kowalski is still the quintessential, top-of-the-mountain male role in American drama.”

For many, the quintessential Kowalski remains Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s film, but Manganiello is a confident guy; he’s not concerned with anyone else’s interpretation. “Am I intimidated? Not at all. I want it to be mine,” he says.

“I have the utmost respect for Brando. Every actor at some point wants to be him. But he saw the role very differently than I do.” He chuckles. “If you hold the play in front of you and watch him in the film, he wasn’t even close to being word perfect.”

Kowalski may be the latest in Manganiello’s recent string of characters who rip their shirts off and howl (including the stripper Big Dick Richie in Steven Soderbergh’s film “Magic Mike”). But in drama school, “I was the go-to weirdo,” Manganiello says. “I got all the crazy, out-there parts,” such as skinheads, drug addicts, syphilis sufferers. For a production of John Guare’s “Lydie Breeze,” in which his character was missing a tooth, Manganiello shaved his head and pulled out his own fake front tooth, the result of being hit by a baseball bat at age 9.

In real life, his posse includes the DJs Z-Trip and Dieselboy, and the artist Shepard Fairey. (Fairey designed an Alcide sticker that Manganiello gives out to fans, and a black-and-gold painting of Fairey’s hangs in Manganiello’s house.)

“We get together and talk art, culture, music, almost like a salon in the Gertrude Stein or Greenwich Village tradition,” Manganiello says. “We figure out what the world needs more of and what we need less of.” He laughs. “I’m excited to get back into these intense theater roles and get wild, get raw. Running shirtless in the woods pays the bills, but it’s only a sliver of what I do. I don’t want it to become what I do, or who I am.”

To that end, Manganiello and his younger brother, Nicholas, recently formed a production company. He’s developing scripts, and is directing and producing a documentary about a male stripper in Dallas. “The real-life ‘Magic Mike,’” he says. “It’s going to blow people’s minds. It’s one of those docs where we’re inside this subculture and it’s fun, flashy, marketable, and then, wow, it just takes this turn into so much heart and substance. I don’t think there’s going to be a dry eye in the house.” He’s hoping to premiere it in January at the Sundance Film Festival.

We’ll also get a deeper insight into Manganiello in December when his book, “Evolution,” comes out (with a forward by Arnold Schwarzenegger). He took what could have been “a book of shirtless photos used as a promotional tool” and broadened it into a fitness/memoir hybrid — workouts designed by “some of the best trainers on the planet,” coupled with Manganiello’s hard-won insights on success. “It’s about removing excuses from the past, so you can set up a plan to move forward and change your life,” he says. “I talk about the things that I had to overcome in order to get to where I am today. Physically, but also mentally and spiritually.”

The book opens with a photo of him in high school in Pittsburgh. “I was super-skinny,” he says. “I couldn’t do one pull-up.” Though he played football, basketball and volleyball, “I wasn’t in the top tier of strength, or even in the middle. I was dead last. But I never gave up. I was a fighter.” (Now, of course, he’s 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds, and though he’s still able to buy off the rack — his favorite designer is John Varvatos — everything must be tailored to fit his slim waist.) Those early failures, Manganiello maintains, are crucial to his current success.

“I think our culture is putting itself in a dangerous position, because it’s setting itself up to remove failure from children’s upbringings. Kids play soccer games where goals aren’t counted, and everybody gets the pat on the back — and that’s just not how men work,” he says. “I have a list in the book of people who failed miserably, and through that, learned how to stand up taller. That’s certainly the case for me.”

In his 20s, Manganiello became addicted to alcohol, and his life spiraled. “I was homeless, carless, broke, struggling, jobless,” he says. “I had horrendous relationships with everyone around me, family, friends. I didn’t act for four years. That’s just a slice of it.”

He didn’t have one low point — there were a few. “The plane didn’t just crash,” he says. “It skidded along the ground for a while. You get to a place where you’re afraid you’re going to do irreversible harm to yourself or to somebody else. That fear grows so great that you wake up one day and you don’t know where you’re headed, and you don’t know what to do, but you just know you can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing. Luckily, I wound up meeting some like-minded people who’d been down that road, who helped me out.”

It took him three years before he could wake up in the morning and feel good, then another two years until he could trust that his instincts “matched what was going on in the real world.” Two years after that, he landed the part on “True Blood.” He’ll celebrate 11 years sober this month.

“I’m a better man for having gone through it,” Manganiello says. “When I was at the point where I had completely failed at life, I swore that if success ever happened, if I ever had another opportunity, I’d never take it for granted. I would spend every waking moment making sure I did the best I could — that I was the best actor that I could be, the best artist, the best producer, son, brother, the best boyfriend.”

Though he won’t discuss his relationships, he has an admitted fondness for curvy women. He ended a two-year engagement to actress Audra Marie in 2011, and currently dates Bridget Peters, a model he met ringside at a boxing match in Las Vegas.

So if he can’t go to the beach without being swarmed, or eat without some rube with a cellphone camera zooming in on his mouth — which recently happened to him in Dallas, where he was shooting his documentary — he just shakes his head at people’s poor manners, and moves on.

“I get it. I have a service industry job,” he says. “I provide something to a crowd. I heard Johnny Depp say that for the past 30 years he’s been living the life of a fugitive. That’s a funny way to put it, but it’s true. You just have to adjust to it, be smart about it.”

And if that doesn’t work, he can always rip off his shirt and growl.

Fashion Editor: Serena French

Stylist: Neil Rodgers at TraceyMattingly.com

Photographer: Randall Slavin

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Location: Hotel Shangri-la Hotel, Santa Monica, shangrila-hotel.com