Excerpt from Joe Manganiello’s memoir: From Death’s Door to Affleck’s Batman

When Joe Manganiello collapsed in pain on the set of Six in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 2016, the 39-year-old was at the peak of his career. He made a name for himself as Alcide, the sensitive and incredibly muscular werewolf in the HBO series. Real bloodwhich led to the meaty role of Big Dick Richie in Steven Soderbergh’s critically acclaimed film Magic Mike movies. People the magazine named him “Hollywood’s Sexiest Bachelor” in 2014 and a year later he got married Modern family star Sofia Vergara. He was on the verge of making the A list when a mysterious illness struck him down. For weeks, an autoimmune disease that doctors couldn’t explain had been attacking his thyroid and ravaging his intestines. Now he could no longer bear this excruciating pain.

During his extended hospital stay, the man who nearly became the next Superman, whose abs had made Arnold Schwarzenegger jealous, went from 235 pounds to 176, “a weight I hadn’t been since middle school,” he writes in his new memoir. Then came what he remembered as “The Night in Hell”: “Rectal blood gushed out, turning the bathroom floor into a pool of crimson, staining the walls, sink and tile grout bright red. » The next day, he was rushed to the operating room. “My entire large intestine had turned to pus and was about to explode. If they hadn’t cut me open that morning, it would have ruptured and I would have died immediately of sepsis.”

Vergara, as next of kin, “made the brutal but life-saving decision to allow my entire large intestine to empty.” be removed and a hole drilled in my abdomen to divert my small intestine” into an ostomy bag that he would have to wear for an indefinite period.

When Manganiello was just beginning to recover, weaning himself off a heavy regimen of painkillers that had strained his sobriety, his agent called to tell him that Ben Affleck wanted to discuss a role in the new Batman movie. Hiding his condition, adrenaline masking his pain, Manganiello took advantage of a meeting with Affleck and offered him the role of Deathstroke, the main villain of the Batman film that Affleck was writing, directing and in which he starred. In an extract from his memoirs, Bloodlines (out Oct. 13 from Avid Reader Press), Manganiello recounts how the offer gave him the motivation to start getting healthy — even as his marriage began to crumble.

Listen to Manganiello read the passage below in an excerpt from Bloodlines audiobook.

She had watched me go from the strongest man she had ever known to a skeleton who could barely move on his own. She was preparing for my death and was clearly deeply traumatized by her fear of my imminent abandonment by death.

“I was just offered the biggest role of my life,” I said.

“Are you crazy?” she shouted at me. “You can’t make this movie!”

She wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a Gremlin in my body’s control room that had locked the door so no one could stop it and was madly flipping the control switches. Against all odds, I was still breathing. My doctors were scrambling to figure out which medication designed for rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions I didn’t specifically have would help my symptoms. They were trying in vain to solve one part of a multi-part problem, giving me these medications, one after the other, all of which had horrible side effects. Sofia had every reason to say what she did, but the way I saw it, I now had a task: prepare for this role. It was just the carrot I needed dangling in front of me, the one that would get me out of this nightmare that my life had become. I needed to believe, even if it turned out to be an illusion, that in a year I could handle the rigors of filming a superhero movie for six months.

This would be my trial by fire. The operation had left me with scars: the long one below my navel that looked like it had been cut open with a survival knife, plus two smaller ones on the right side of my abdomen, where the catheters had been inserted. They were very fresh, and while they might raise eyebrows if seen, they were nothing compared to the golf ball-sized hole that doctors had drilled into the wall of my stomach to extract the end of my fleshy, pink small intestine that was now covered by a large plastic ostomy bag.

Adjusting to life without a large intestine was like waking up in someone else’s body. Without the storage capacity of a colon, within minutes of eating something, my body would immediately expel waste through the stoma. There was no real way of knowing when it would start or stop. Sometimes it started thirty minutes after eating, sometimes earlier. As I tried to gain all that weight back, eating regularly throughout the day, my digestive system was working 24 hours a day, which meant I was constantly changing bags and not getting any rest, even during the night.

But I had the routine. I would take some adhesive putty, work a piece between my fingers until it was soft and sticky, and spread it in a circle around the protruding hole. I would then glue a plastic ring over the putty, making sure it was airtight, before attaching an ostomy bag to the ring. When applied perfectly, the stoma empties directly into the bag and does not leak.

To make matters more complicated, I had always slept on my stomach. All my life I had slept on my stomach, with a pillow under my chest and my arms spread above my head. I was now forced to sleep on my left side purely because of the way the bag sank and hung once it started to fill up. Lying on my back was out of the question, because at that angle the stoma ignited like a geyser and compromised the adhesive seal, causing it to leak into my abdomen.

This had led to several nervous breakdowns during my first weeks back home. I would wake up in the middle of the night, out of breath, lying in a puddle of sweat, my hair soaked. I leaned over to find the bag leaking through my pajamas and quietly got up to throw the trash away, hoping not to wake Sofia. Because I couldn’t control the flow, I often had no choice but to stand in the shower, lean against the wall, and close my eyes until my body ran out of sludge. The complete loss of muscle mass in my lats and back, as well as the rest of my body, made my sleep problems worse.

Having muscle mass was like having pillows attached to my skeleton: not only did it make lying down more comfortable, it held my spine in place. Because I had lost a lot of it and was sleeping in unnatural positions, I started having neck and spinal problems. And as my body suffered from all kinds of internal and external inflammation, I would wake up at night shivering and sweating. I learned to put towels under me and change them every time I woke up.

Sofia couldn’t bring herself to congratulate me on landing the biggest role of my career. She had just watched me die and come back to life thanks to the wonders of modern science, and I think that during my illness, part of her had begun to adjust to the traumatic idea of ​​living her life without me. Now I was packing my bags to leave her for an incredibly high-stakes job that I was in no condition to accept. Even though it was hard for her to understand, I needed it to survive. The role contained an ounce of hope that I could get my life back to some extent, and I had to believe that it was possible.

My job was simple: be a warrior. When I looked into my eyes in the mirror, there was no fear, just determination. In them, I saw a look like that of Clint Eastwood when he played the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy or Dirty Harry. The look that told other men he would pull the trigger without hesitation or remorse, the look that always made them step back. I was no longer afraid of dying; death already knew who I was, and that look was now in my eyes. I had fought my illness with every fiber of my being, and then I fought again. I had discovered additional gears in myself. I would gain the weight back, reconnect my digestive system, lose the bag, and get back to my life. This role was my destiny. I had been kicked off a set because of my health, but that wouldn’t happen again.

I hated the pity I saw in Sofia’s eyes when she looked at me now. When we first met, she looked at me with such pride; I would have gone to war and conquered the world for this look. Now all I could see in the background was this sick, pitiful patient. I was determined to see Sofia’s eyes sparkle for me again like before, even if it killed me.

I caught my flight to Heathrow and did my best to sleep on my side in the pod. I had my blanket up and was starting to doze off when I leaned over and felt moisture. There was a fucking leak in my ostomy bag, and shit was starting to soak my underwear. I stood up, carefully holding my shirt away from my body, praying that no trash would settle on it, leaving a stain that would smell for the entire flight. I collected my backpack filled with my supplies: a spare ring, putty, a trash bag to hold the used bag, a fresh ostomy bag, and clean underwear. I had quickly learned that it was wise to keep clean underwear on hand at all times. I went to the bathroom, carefully took off my shirt and started swapping the bag. When I pulled it out, the stoma fired like a cannon, spraying…