-Our first guest tonight is a talented actor
you know from the "Magic Mike" franchise,
as well as shows like "True Blood."
You can see him in "Metal Lords,"
which premieres this Friday on Netflix.
Let's take a look.
-Drugs, weed, coke? -No.
-Meth? -No.
-H? -No.
-Acid? -No.
-Molly? -No.
-Are you vaping? -No.
-Self-harm? -No.
-Sleep too much? -No.
-Too little? -No.
-Suicidal ideation? -[ Scoffs ]
-Did you destroy any property?
-Not that they know about.
-What then?
-[ Sighs ]
Just metal, man.
-Pbbbt...
-Please welcome back to the show Joe Manganiello, everybody!
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Great to have you back. -Nice to be back.
Thank you. -I want to talk about the film,
but I always like connecting with you
over our love of Pittsburgh sports.
-Yeah.
-You are throwing out the first pitch.
-Opening day, 4/12.
The area code in Pittsburgh is 412.
So on 4/12, at 4:12 in the afternoon,
I'm going to throw the first pitch.
-This is very exciting.
Have you thrown out a first pitch before?
-No. I've been invited a bunch of times.
I was also invited by the Dodgers.
Listen. I told them
I have to throw the first pitch for the Pirates first.
-That's good. And I think that those are
the opposite ends of the spectrum,
as far as what kind of season they're expecting,
the Dodgers and the Pirates.
-Salary cap, yes, of course.
-That really speaks to your loyalty.
This is a great sacrifice to the quality of play
that you might expect to see on opening day.
-I am a good sport.
It's going to be written on my gravestone.
-I know you played a lot of sports growing up.
Did you play baseball? -I did when I was younger
until I got hit in the face with a baseball bat.
-Now, it's interesting, because that doesn't happen that often.
[ Laughter ] Either the guy with the bat
or the guy with the face is doing something wrong.
-You know, when you're a kid, what's the number-one thing?
Don't swing a bat when anyone's around you.
-That's true. That's what they tell you.
-What did the kid do? Bang. And my front teeth blasted out.
-Really? -So I'm actually --
This is actually a bridge I have in right now,
because after 36 years, we had to go in, like,
clear out what was left of those broken teeth.
-Wow! -And drill screws into
my jawline to put the cap on.
-Do you think that kid has any understanding
as an adult now of whose mouth he [bleep] with?
[ Laughter ]
-And it wasn't cheap, all this dental work.
-No, I would imagine.
-So it's been a lifetime of that.
But there is a silver lining.
When I was in drama school, end of freshman year,
they gave me the scene of this character
who played Frankenstein on stage and complained
about having this chipped tooth and he had syphilis
and was crazy, as you do in drama school.
And so I just got a loaf of French bread
and worked the front tooth out in one of them.
-Wow! -And I thought, well,
he's Frankenstein, he's an animated corpse.
So I just shaved my head bald. -Yeah.
-But I didn't tell my scene partner, which, in hindsight,
I probably should've said, "Hey, I'm going to do
this big, radical physical transformation for the role."
And so I'm standing backstage, she's delivering a monologue.
That morning I wore a ski hat
and Super Poligrip'd my tooth in so nobody knew.
During morning yoga warm-ups, no one had any idea.
And then she had this beautiful monologue,
and then I walk out on stage
with this tooth gone and the bald head.
And she went up on her lines and forgot her lines.
-Yeah. Rightfully so.
[ Laughter ]
-They were, like, talking about throwing me out of school.
They were, like, "Grow your hair back.
Put your tooth back in. Come back next year.
Stop it. Stop it."
-I do feel like the acting teacher
has to address the class and be like,
"We don't feel like any of you
should ever feel the need to remove a tooth."
-"Stop ripping your teeth out." Yeah.
-One last thing before we move on to the movie.
You are doing an Audible. You're doing the voice.
You're the -- I guess the narrator is the correct way
to describe this, about Sidney Crosby,
the great Pittsburgh Penguin, about his rookie season.
Now, I would imagine you've met Sidney over the years?
-Yeah, yeah. We've become friends over the years.
So becoming friends with Sid and then being selected
to narrate the story of his rookie season was such an honor.
And, you know, I hosted the NHL Awards at one point.
-That's cool. It's really nice.
When they know that you respect what they do,
it makes it a lot easier, too. -I love them.
I love Pittsburgh, so, you know. -That's great.
This film is a lovely film
about this group of teenagers who is into metal.
And, you know, that's a scene where you realize
a lot of people get worried when kids are into metal,
but it's also a wonderful community
and I think that sometimes adults overreact to it.
Were you into metal as a kid? -I was. Yeah.
And, well, when I grew up,
it was, Satan is going to come for you!
-Yeah. -And even though Ozzy
was accused of being a satanist, but it was like,
all of his songs are about running away from Satan.
Well, then you get Slayer, but that's a whole other thing.
But, yeah, I was.
My father had a great record collection,
so I think it probably started out with Zeppelin, Doors,
and then I got into, like, Sabbath.
My first concert was Pantera, Sepultura, Biohazard.
Am I speaking a foreign language or --
[ Cheers and applause ]
Okay. Yeah, cool. -So, your wife, Sofia Vergara,
does she care about metal at all?
-No. No, no, no. -Yeah.
-When I go down -- I have a home gym that I built.
And when I go and work out, I'll, you know,
put on some metal, aggressive music,
and I'll come upstairs,
and she'll just have this look on her face like,
"You put on the devil music again."
So she's on board with the whole Satan thing, I guess, too.
She thinks that Satan's coming for me when I work out.
-We've talked about it. You mentioned you built a gym.
We've talked about the other room in your house
that is well-known in L.A. circles and in D&D circles.
This is a true thing.
You host a D&D night in Los Angeles.
And you have a room for it, right?
-I do. It shares a wall with the gym,
which is probably a good microcosm
of my whole personality, I think.
There's this gym and Olympic lifting going on,
and on the other side of the wall,
it's Dungeons & Dragons. I have a dungeon that I built.
-It's a very funny thing to think about reselling one day
and having a real-estate agent be like,
"And then this is a D&D/gym."
-Yep, yep. Well, when people -- Yeah.
When people came to look at the house, I did think --
I hope that the realtor said something appropriate
about why this is in the basement.
But, you know, it's really -- it's something I grew up with.
It was a real fountainhead of creativity for me.
People ask me all the time, who was I in high school?
I was a three-sport captain who was on the honor roll.
I was in AP physics, but I also ran these games for my friends.
And it became kind of like -- I started making my own films
and producing and directing and writing,
and starring in my own movies with all my friends,
and that was how I started acting, writing, producing.
-From doing, like, D&D-inspired? That's amazing.
-It was like running my own show
every day during the summer for my friends
who got to play characters in them.
-So this is really cool.
D.B. Weiss, who is one of the co-creators
with David Benioff of "Game of Thrones,"
he wrote the "Metal" film that you're in.
And he asked to join your game. -Sort of.
Well, so, Tom Morello, guitar god, Rage Against the Machine,
he did all the music for "Metal Lords."
Tom was in my group first. -Got it.
-Because I had heard that Tom played when he was a kid,
and I said, "I play as an adult. It's a whole different thing.
You gotta come over." [ Laughter ]
So he came and played, and the group was really big.
-What's big?
-Big was like, we were around, like, seven, eight-ish.
-Okay, gotcha.
-You want to try to keep it around four to six.
But we were getting into seven, we were getting into eight,
and Tom said, "Hey, there's this guy
in my kid's carpool, he wants to play."
I said, "Nah, the group's kind of big. We're ballooning.
I just want to keep it intimate."
And he said, "He created 'Game of Thrones.'"
And I went, "Oh. Dan or Dave?"
He said, "Dan." I go, "Yeah, he can play."
And then Dan came and played, and then he was texting,
which you don't do while the Dungeon Master is working.
-Right. Of course. -And so he's texting.
And I'm, like, "Dude, what's up?"
And he's, like, "No, it's Dave.
He wants to know how many hit points the dragon has."
I'm, like, "I'm not gonna tell you.
You have to kill it, then I'll tell you."
And he said, "Oh, he said he's going to divorce me
as a creative partner unless I get him into your game.
Can he come next week?"
And I said, "Alright, sure." -So you made an exception.
Now, is it higher stakes for you as a Dungeon Master?
Because you're running the show, right, every week?
-Yeah. I'm like Dan and Dave. -For "Game of Thrones."
Do they -- I'm wondering, one,
what's the stress like for you with them there?
And, two, are they just so relieved not to be in charge
and get to just be playing?
-I think the latter, because they've said it.
Dan has said it a lot that he would live for the game,
and if he had to miss a game, like, for a wedding,
he's texting trying to find out what's going on,
and everyone's like, "Dan, we're facing incredible odds."
But, yeah, I think that it became this kind of fun thing
where they didn't have to run the show.
They could just be actors in the show that I was running.
-It's about time. They deserve it.
After everything they gave us, they deserve that.
So thank you for being the one to give that to them.
-And I actually used their dragons against them.
I found the figurines.
My nephew gave me -- My nephew Rafa gave me
a bunch of dragons that were "Game of Thrones" dragons,
so I would use them and try to kill them.
-Turnabout is fair play. -It is.
-I know that you're incredibly proud of the work
you've done over the years, but we also did some digging
and saw that you were in a telenovela,
but an American telenovela, right?
-Yes. -What was the name of it?
-Oh, boy. It was called "American Heiress."
-Okay.
-So, Rupert Murdoch bought all of the telenovelas
from Latin America and had them translated,
not written, just --
-Like Google translated? -Like, you know,
"How is your sister's love interest?"
You know, you're like... "You mean boyfriend?"
[ Laughter ]
And so there were all these fights that happened on set.
There was no show runner. So it was like "Lord of the Flies."
We were all at each other's throats
arguing over what we were going to shoot.
-But you shot a lot, right?
Because it's, like, soap-opera schedule.
-Yeah. We shot like 55 pages a day.
Which, like, for example,
"True Blood," we'd shoot five or six.
-Wow! -Okay, so they would do
everything from one side, thinking they were saving time.
So you would shoot 16 scenes from 11 different episodes
from the entire run of 65.
[ Laughter ] One way.
-So if your character was in a kitchen,
every time he was in a kitchen for the whole season,
you would shoot in one day? -You'd shoot it, yeah.
And then you would turn around at lunch
to go the other way and get their coverage.
So it was, like -- It was insane.
And then, like, for example,
if you were walking down a hallway
and then you open the door and you walk into a room
and say something, they would film the hallway
two months before the room you walked into.
So I kind of had an idea
that they were never gonna run these episodes.
-They were never gonna be on TV?
-Yeah, yeah. I got a strong inkling.
And so I just tried to keep myself sane.
And I would go to the movie theater and give, like, a P.A.
my number and just be, like,
"Just hit me if you need me back.
I'll be right down the street at the movie theater."
And then I went --
Knowing that there's a hallway scene
and then I open the door to the room,
we were going to film in two months later,
I started heavily tanning in those two months
and started avoiding my haircuts on Friday
and kind of wasn't shaving as much leading up in that week.
And so what you got, which no one saw,
was me walking down a hallway, pasty, clean-shaven,
you know, like, very bright white.
And I opened the door, and it's like super tan,
shaggy hair, "Hey,"
close the door and go right back down the hallway.
-Now, I think people would've watched that show.
I think you're selling it short.
-You know, I tried to make it interesting.
If they were ever going to make all those episodes.
-Well, I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to see that,
but of course it's always great to see you here.
Thank you so much, Joe. -Appreciate it. Thank you.
-Joe Manganiello, everybody.
"Metal Lords" premieres on Netflix this Friday.