TV Talk: Mt. Lebanon native Joe Manganiello surprised in PBS’s ‘Finding Your Roots’

Actor Joe Manganiello, a 1995 graduate of Mt. Lebanon High School and a 2000 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s acting program who was most recently seen in the now-canceled AMC+ series “Moonhaven,” gets some surprises when his family history is revealed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots” (8 p.m. Tuesday, WQED-TV).

In the episode, Manganiello recounts how he got into acting after being “railroaded into playing Goliath” in a fifth grade school play and gained a renewed interest later in life when he met a security guard who turned his life around performing Shakespeare in prison.

What’s unique about Manganiello’s story is the surprises that Gates and “Roots” researchers discovered on both sides of Manganiello’s family tree.

“If you’re Armenian, you’re descended from some form of survivor (of the Armenian genocides of 1915-23),” Manganiello recalled in a July press conference during PBS’s portion of the summer 2022 virtual Television Critics Association press tour. “I just heard all these stories growing up about my great-grandmother under the umbrella of World War I, that the Turks came into her house, killed her husband, shot her. She had the presence of mind to lay on the ground and pretend that she was dead while they shot seven of her children and left the eighth one to starve in the crib.

“She took a piece of clothing from each one of the children and then strapped the eighth child on her back and then swam across the Euphrates River to get away from the death march,” Manganiello continued. “When she got to the other side, the baby on her back had drowned, so she lost the eighth child. She got picked up. Mind you, she’s got a bullet (in her). She gets put into, I think, an internment camp, and there was a German officer who was stationed there during World War I. The Turks worship German military might at that time, so they invited the German officers to come stay in the camps, and that’s where things got muddy.”

Gates helps clarify that family history on the side of Manganiello’s mother, Susan, including the identity of the German officer, his great-grandfather.

“I look like that German guy,” Manganiello said. “I worked in Europe, and all the Europeans thought I was a German, which, for me, with someone with my last name which is so ethnic, to think that the reason I don’t look like the other people in my family is because I look like the Germans. Now that makes sense.”

Gates said because the Turkish government never acknowledged the Armenian genocide, it doesn’t permit researchers access to Ottoman vital records and population documents, and because there were about 25,000 German soldiers stationed in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the only way to uncover the identity of Manganiello’s great-grandfather was through DNA research.

“It took almost a year, but CeCe Moore, the genius behind all of our DNA analysis, was able to identify the German soldier who fathered Joe’s grandmother, Sandra,” Gates said.

Manganiello said it was important to go into “Finding Your Roots” with an open mind.

“That same great-grandfather who was the perpetrator of whatever sort of impregnation happened to this Armenian genocide survivor, you’ve got victim and perpetrator,” Manganiello said. “Now I have two great-uncles who go off to war against my two grandfathers, as it turns out.”

The show uncovered more revelations when it turned to the history of Manganiello’s father, Charles Manganiello.

“I had to call Joe and tell him that the man his father called his father was not his biological father,” Gates said. “It was a complicated story.”

The surprises didn’t end there, but we won’t spoil the show’s further revelations.

Manganiello said he has been interested in his genealogy for years, but recently he hit a wall that only could be overcome with advances in DNA technology.

“They even helped me then connect some other dots and send me on my way to go track down some other information I had questions about,” Manganiello said. “It didn’t even stop once my episode was done.”

Manganiello compared learning about his family history to pulling a string on a sweater.

“You pick some big event of the past few hundred years,” he said, “and I’ve got some crazy genealogical story related to it (on) both sides.”