Joe Manganiello, Reacher and the Tom Cruise theory

Joe Manganiello says he came close to playing Jack Reacher, and his version of how it fell apart is the loudest chapter in his new memoir. Page Six reports that he auditioned for Amazon's Reacher in January 2020 and met first with Don Granger, who was then Skydance Media's president of feature films. The book, Bloodlines, is out Oct. 13 from Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster.

Manganiello writes that the two talked for an hour and a half, that they discussed the backlash over Tom Cruise's size, and that the production was only meeting actors taller than 6-foot-2. Reacher is 6-foot-5 in Lee Child's books. Cruise, who starred in the earlier film adaptations, is 5-foot-7, a gap that drew complaints from readers.

According to the book, Granger told him he was "the closest thing to Jack Reacher that I've ever met in my entire life."

From there, Manganiello says he moved to a 19-page dialogue reading that impressed showrunner Nick Santora enough that Santora started writing the season around him. He writes that Granger called him "our first choice across the board," and that after a screen test his agents told him Skydance owner David Ellison and Child were thrilled with his performance.

The decision then reached Jen Salke, who was running Amazon MGM Studios at the time. Manganiello writes that he heard she was angry about being left out of the casting process and that she felt "railroaded into a final decision made by a group of primarily male producers that she didn't feel part of." He says she was pulling for Smallville's Tom Welling. After a second screen test, held during the COVID lockdown, he was told he had not landed the role.

Rumor: his team wondered whether Cruise, credited as an executive producer because of the earlier films, had stepped in and vetoed him over a past relationship with Manganiello's then-wife, Sofia Vergara. Manganiello writes that Salke never gave a reason, which is what left room for the theory. He is clear that it is one: "It was all just speculation. No one would tell me what the hell happened."

IMDb does not list Cruise as an executive producer on Reacher, and Page Six notes that could have changed once the show was up and running. His reps did not return Page Six's request for comment. Reps for Vergara did not respond.

The book reaches back to 2016 as well. Manganiello says he met director Ed Zwick about the villain part in the 2016 sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, and that Zwick told him he resembled the Reacher of the books too closely. Asked his height, Manganiello said 6-foot-5. Zwick's reply, as quoted in the book: "Right. Tom's never going to let that happen. But you were great."

Manganiello and Vergara married in 2015, separated in 2023 and finalized their divorce in 2024. He writes that she had ended a brief relationship with Cruise in 2005, and that she told him she walked away after declining to take an E-Meter test at a Scientology center.

The role went to Alan Ritchson. Reacher is shooting its fifth season and has been renewed through a sixth.

The PR Read

Casting a franchise is a chain of approvals: producers, the showrunner, the studio, then the service paying the bill. When the person at the end of that chain was not in the room, a decision can sit for months for reasons that have nothing to do with who read best. Chapters about the part you nearly got follow a pattern too. They hand a memoir its news hook, and they put the author on record as the near-miss rather than the actor who lost out. Page Six supplies the second half of this one: the credit Manganiello's team built its theory on does not appear on IMDb, and Cruise's reps stayed quiet.

• Amazon
• Bloodlines
• Joe Manganiello
• Reacher
• Sofia Vergara
• Tom Cruise