TV Talk: Joe Manganiello on Pittsburgh pizza, Primanti’s-level fame and ‘Moonhaven’

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When Joe Manganiello was in Pittsburgh earlier this year to throw out the first pitch at the Pirates’ home opener, it was the realization of a dream long delayed.

“The Pirates have asked me a few times, and I couldn’t do it because of scheduling,” Manganiello said in a recent phone interview. “Then the Dodgers asked me, and I said, ‘No, I have to do Pittsburgh first.’ So the scheduling worked out, and it was really great.”

Manganiello, a 1995 graduate of Mt. Lebanon High School and a 2000 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s acting program, tries to get home to Pittsburgh to see his mom, Susan, and childhood friends as often as possible. He’s also on the board of trustees of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation and he hosted Penguins star Sidney Crosby’s “The Rookie Year” podcast for Audible.com.

Manganiello said his wife, actress Sofia Vergara (“Modern Family”), understands his devotion to his hometown now.

“There was a bit in the beginning where I was so pro-Pittsburgh, she just thought that I was delusional,” Manganiello said. “We’d start talking about pizza, and I’d say, ‘No, you never had pizza like Pittsburgh pizza, it’s just amazing.’ And she’s like, ‘I lived in New York.’ She just thought I was blowing smoke.”

Then he took her to one of his favorite Pittsburgh places, Fiori’s Pizzaria.

“The next morning we woke up and she said, ‘Can we get pizza for breakfast?’ So we went back to Fiori’s. We went, like, three days in a row,” Manganiello said. He’s even suggested buying a home in Pittsburgh, and Vergara is all for it. “She understands how much we love it.”

Manganiello next stars in the sci-fi-tinged thriller “Moonhaven,” streaming Thursday on AMC+. Created and written by Peter Ocko (“Lodge 49,” “Black Sails”), the six-episode first season is set 100 years in the future on a utopian moon colony that’s designed to find solutions for growing problems on Earth, including catastrophic climate change.

The series focuses on lunar cargo pilot Bella Sway (Emma McDonald), who gets enmeshed in a conspiracy to gain control of the artificial intelligence that created Moonhaven.

Two episodes debut June 7 with one new episode premiering on subsequent Thursdays.

Dominic Monaghan (“Lost”) plays an often bored “Moonhaven” cop, and Manganiello is Tomm, a bodyguard for a political leader (Amarna Karan) who grew up “in Highland Park near Pittsburgh,” which in the future is “Russian country” where “the people are good — they just don’t have much.”

“I like weird parts, and this was about as weird as you could get,” Manganiello said of his “Moonhaven” role, which was filmed last fall in and around Dublin, Ireland. “But it made sense to me and actually come to find out it made more sense to me than it did to the writer. And it definitely made more sense to me than the directors. The directors had no idea what to do with the character. They didn’t get it. They’re asking me.”

Manganiello said Tomm is a former soldier who did hardcore tours of duty in a war against China. But Tomm also has some ties to the supernatural.

“You learn in episode one that his mother had some form of power, some kind of weird, psychic or metaphysical power, and it’s slid into him,” he said. “He has visions and sees things and then also uses that almost the way that a CIA operative would use it to be able to be present with someone in a bizarre situation, and then see how they would react, and it would tell him everything he needed to know about their personality. It keeps people on edge.”

When he’s injected with a moon drug, his latent psychic ability gets unlocked.

“He’s kind of like this psychic Dick Cheney,” Manganiello said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, so I wanted to play the character.”

More recently, Manganiello wrapped filming the indie feature “The Kill Room” in New Jersey, acting alongside Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman. Manganiello plays a hitman for a drug dealer (Jackson) who concocts a plan to launder money through an art gallery with Manganiello’s character charged with creating fake art that then catches on and an art dealer (Thurman) mentors the budding artist while he attempts to escape the drug trade. (The film is seeking a distributor.)

“To work with those legends, with that caliber of actor and also such great material, it was awesome,” Manganiello said. “I’ve never seen anyone enjoy fame more than Sam Jackson. Sam Jackson’s standard, which is really funny, is, ‘If you’re a (jerk), you shouldn’t be famous.’ He’s just great. We got along like peanut butter and jelly.”

One thing Manganiello hasn’t gotten to do yet in his acting career: film a role in his hometown.

“The (film tax credit) rebates had never worked out financially for the independents that (I’ve produced),” he said. “I’m the world’s biggest David Fincher fan. I would have been a friggin’ extra on ‘Mindhunter’ if he would have let me, so it’s not for lack of wanting. I do keep thinking about coming back and shooting something there because I met — I think it was a (state) senator — who said I could have my own day in Pittsburgh. So, I’m trying to figure out something to shoot there, so I can come back and have an excuse to have my own day. That’s not the kind of stuff I really care about, but I do care about it when it comes to Pittsburgh.

“Getting my face on the wall at Primanti Bros. was (expletive) huge,” Manganiello said. “I booked a flight that morning when I heard about it to go back. I had somebody go down there and take a picture of it. For me, that’s the biggest honor you can have as a Pittsburgher.”