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Joe Manganiello suspects Tom Cruise may have blocked him from starring as Jack Reacher because of their mutual ex, Sofía Vergara.
In his new memoir, the “Magic Mike” star claims that Amazon execs and production bigs were set on him to play the famed Lee Child character in the streamer’s TV adaptation.
But he says that when the part suddenly went to someone else, his team thought Cruise — who played Reacher in the 2012 and 2016 movie versions of the books — had him nixed.
In “Bloodlines,” Manganiello writes that in January 2020, he met with Don Granger, an exec at Skydance Media, which produced the Reacher films and the shows. “We talked for an hour and a half,” Manganiello writes, discussing “the backlash over Tom’s size.” In the books, Reacher is an imposing 6-foot-5, and Cruise is famously a diminutive 5-foot-7. Manganiello says Granger told him, “You are the closest thing to Jack Reacher that I’ve ever met in my entire life . . . You look like Reacher is described in the books . . . You have his effortless intelligence.”
The “Magic Mike” star then allegedly impressed showrunner Nick Santora so much that he began writing the rest of the season with Manganiello in mind. He claims Skydance owner David Ellison and author Child were also “thrilled with my performance.”
But when Manganiello was presented to Amazon head Jen Salke, things soured. He writes that Salke was furious at being excluded from the casting process and “felt that she was being railroaded into a final decision made by a group of primarily male producers that she didn’t feel part of.”
When Manganiello was told he hadn’t landed the role, his team speculated wildly that Cruise, “an executive producer [on the show], could have potentially come in over the top and vetoed my being cast on account of Sofía.” Cruise had allegedly dated Vergara, Manganiello’s then-wife, in 2005. He is not listed on IMDb as part of the “Reacher” production.
Reps for Cruise did not get back to us.