Joe Manganiello is opening up about enduring multiple gruesome experiences during a long-term battle with a mystery illness.
“This would be my trial by fire,” Manganiello, 49, wrote in an excerpt from Bloodlines: A Memoir, which was published by The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday, October 8. “[An] operation had left me with scars: the long one below my belly button that looked like I’d been split open with a survival knife, plus two smaller ones on the right side of my abdomen where the catheters had been inserted.”
He continued, “[My scars] were very fresh, and while they might raise eyebrows if they were seen, they were nothing compared to the golf ballsized hole the doctors had drilled through my stomach wall to pull out the end of my fleshy, pink small intestine that was now covered by a large plastic ostomy bag.”
Manganiello was forced to take time away from acting when he collapsed on a Wilmington, North Carolina, film set in 2016. What followed was a nightmarish experience he referred to as “The Night in Hell,” as his large intestine began to rupture.
“Rectal blood sprayed out, turning the bathroom floor into a crimson pool, staining the walls, the sink, and tile grout bright red,” he recalled. “My entire large intestine had turned to pus and was about to explode. Had they not cut me open that morning, it would have ruptured, and I would have died immediately of sepsis.”
The True Blood alum credited his then-wife, Sofía Vergara, with saving his life by making a “brutal but lifesaving decision to allow my entire large intestine to be removed and a hole to be cut into my abdomen to divert my small intestine” into an ostomy bag. (An ostomy bag is a medical device that collects human waste from a surgically created opening in the abdomen called a stoma.)
Manganiello was still a long way from recovery, even after undergoing his life-saving operation. The wear and tear on his body had been so severe that he’d dropped from 235 pounds to just 176 — a weight Manganiello hadn’t been since middle school.
Adapting to wearing an ostomy bag came with its own set of challenges. In his memoir, the actor documented having “several nervous breakdowns” as he conformed to his new reality.
“I’d wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air, lying in a puddle of sweat, my hair drenched,” he remembered. “I’d reach down to discover that the bag was leaking through my pajamas and quietly get out of bed to dispose of the waste, hoping I didn’t wake Sofia. Because I couldn’t control the output, I would often have no other 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, compounded my sleep issues.”
In the middle of his recovery, Manganiello was offered the biggest role of his career, playing the DC Comics villain Deathstroke in Ben Affleck‘s Batman movie. (The project never actually got off the ground, though Manganiello briefly appeared as the baddie in 2017’s Justice League.)
Per Manganiello, Vergara, 54, desperately tried to convince him not to move forward with costume fittings and creative meetings for the Batman project given his fragile state. (The former couple separated in 2023 and finalized their divorce the following year.)
“Sofia couldn’t bring herself to congratulate me on landing the biggest role of my career,” he wrote in Bloodlines. “She’d just watched me die and come back to life through the marvel of modern science, and I think during my illness part of her had begun to adapt to the traumatic thought of living her life without me. Now here I was packing to leave her for an unbelievably high-stakes job that I was in no shape to take. Hard as it was for her to understand, I needed it to survive. The role contained the shred of hope that I might get my life back in some capacity, and I had to believe it was possible.”
Manganiello forged ahead with a trip to London for a Batman costume fitting anyway. However, the actor experienced a mid-flight emergency with his ostomy bag.
“I boarded my flight to Heathrow and tried my best to sleep on my side in the pod. I had my blanket pulled up and was starting to doze when I reached down and felt moisture,” he wrote. “There was a f***ing leak in my ostomy bag, and s*** had started to soak my underwear. I got up, carefully holding my shirt away from my body, praying none of the waste got on it, leaving a stain that would smell for the entire flight.”
He went on, “I got my backpack from the overhead full of my supplies: a spare ring, the putty, a waste bag to hold the used bag, a fresh ostomy bag, and clean underwear. I’d learned pretty quickly that it was wise to keep clean underwear on hand at all times. I got to the bathroom, peeled my shirt off carefully, and started swapping out the bag. As I removed it, the stoma shot like a cannon, spraying onto the mirror and counter.”
Manganiello “grabbed a wad of tissues and plugged” the hole before emptying the contents of the bag into the airplane toilet.
“Once I had things under control, I changed my underwear, which thankfully was the only article of clothing compromised,” he noted. “Then I took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. ‘You’re a tough son of a bitch,’ I said. ‘You’re a bad dude. I love you.’ I nodded silently to myself in affirmation, then headed back to my seat to try to sleep.”
Manganiello largely kept his health issues private over the last decade. In June, he confirmed he’d delve candidly into his experiences with a mystery illness in his memoir.
The actor told his Instagram followers that he’d met with “the best doctors in the world,” but his symptoms vexed all of them.
“All of their attempts to treat it with high-powered biologic drugs only exacerbated my symptoms and then unlocked a host of brutal side effects that have [been] plaguing me for years. In attempts to buy myself time, I underwent very serious operations and procedures that mutilated parts of my body and left me so weak at times that I couldn’t stand up or walk,” he explained. “I spent months and months heavily medicated while dealing with excruciating boughs of chronic pain.”
At the time, Manganiello hinted that he finally found some relief by embracing “really radical and unorthodox techniques and ideas that lied beyond the boundaries of western medicine.”
“So if you’re out there and you’re suffering, then there’s hope,” he promised fans. “And hopefully you will get something out of [this book].”
Bloodlines hits bookshelves on Tuesday, October 13.
