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"   His last name may be hard to pronounce, but Joe Manganiello&amp;#039;s appeal easily translates: He&amp;#039;s the 6&amp;#039;5&amp;quot; he-man with cobblestone abs who brought a massive hit of feral masculinity to HBO&amp;#039;s True Blood as the werewolf Alcide Herveaux. Initially hired for just six episodes, Manganiello elicited public approval so loud the network couldn&amp;#039;t let him go. (For that same reason, it seems, he often appears on How I Met Your Mother.) Among his Hollywood peers, Chelsea Handler memorably announced at the MTV Movie Awards that she wanted to ride home on his face. Last year, Octavia Spencer, Community&amp;#039;s Yvette Nicole Brown, and Retta, from Parks and Recreation, engaged in a Twitter feud over Manganiello, who eventually had to weigh in himself, tweeting, &amp;quot;Can&amp;#039;t we all get along here! #FourWay.&amp;quot; Manganiello, who starred as Big Dick Richie in Steven Soderbergh&amp;#039;s essential Magic Mike, proposed to his girlfriend in Italy in 2010 but reportedly broke things off before settling on a wedding date. He&amp;#039;s now dating model Bridget Peters, whom he met in Las Vegas earlier this year. He&amp;#039;ll be in classier surroundings shortly: The 36-year-old actor\u2014who studied drama at Carnegie Mellon\u2014brings his werewolf energy to the stage, starring as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Stella! ELLE: Who was your first crush? Joe Manganiello: Princess Leia from Star Wars. I actually met Carrie Fisher a couple of years ago. When I told her that she was my first crush, she insisted that we get married and have a reality show about it. I&amp;#039;m lucky to have made it out of that weekend without getting married. ELLE: Have you ever asked a woman to dress up as Princess Leia? JM: I&amp;#039;m a nerd. But I&amp;#039;m not that hard-core. ELLE: Speaking of dress-up: As a 16-year-old in Pittsburgh, you worked at bars\u2014wearing the Captain Morgan pirate costume as part of a promotion. How did women respond? JM: I was severely underage. Those were the first times I was ever in a bar. Ever drunk in a bar. It was a bit of an education. I&amp;#039;d lie to the hot college girls about going to the University of Pittsburgh. Little did they know that I didn&amp;#039;t have a driver&amp;#039;s license. My mom would drop me off. ELLE: Wait, your mom dropped you off? JM: I don&amp;#039;t think she knew what was going on. She knew I was going to make $25 an hour. Those were some of the greatest nights of my life. ELLE: You wore a thong in Magic Mike. Did that give you an appreciation for what women go through? JM: What&amp;#039;s funny is that male strippers don&amp;#039;t wear thongs anymore. They wear flat backs. [Laughs] I don&amp;#039;t know what was going on with wardrobe, but whatever. Yes, they&amp;#039;re insanely uncomfortable. But women do a lot of uncomfortable things for men\u2014and I appreciate it all. I appreciate high heels. I appreciate thongs. ELLE: Your character was named Big Dick Richie. There&amp;#039;s a lot of expectation there. Do women ever ask for proof? JM: Hell yeah. That&amp;#039;s one of the big reasons you take that part. ELLE: Have you always been comfortable naked? JM: No. I play characters who are comfortable naked, but that&amp;#039;s something you work up to. I did a play off-Broadway in New York when I was in college. It was full-frontal nudity. It&amp;#039;s nerve-racking. ELLE: Was it also empowering? JM: No. Doing theater is like walking a tightrope without a net. This was like walking a tightrope without a net\u2014with a giant fan blowing at you. ELLE: Ever get any valuable advice about women? JM: Definitely. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not leaving the relationship, I&amp;#039;m just leaving the house.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s a big one. What&amp;#039;s another one? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d rather be a liar than an asshole.&amp;quot; ELLE: What does that mean? JM: We&amp;#039;ve all had those phone conversations. Things are heated, you&amp;#039;re in a position where you&amp;#039;re gonna say something nasty. Instead, you say, &amp;quot;Oh, I&amp;#039;ve got that thing in the oven.&amp;quot; Lie. Get off the phone. Don&amp;#039;t perpetuate a bad situation. ELLE: Your engagement a few years ago was called off. Did you dodge a bullet? JM: I&amp;#039;m hesitant to talk about that. My goal is not to harm her. But I&amp;#039;m the happiest and most fulfilled I&amp;#039;ve ever been. And if I had stayed in that relationship, that wouldn&amp;#039;t be the case. ELLE: A lot of actors get married young these days. Why settle down when the world is opening up to you? JM: You know, I was single long enough, and when I was, it wasn&amp;#039;t about putting notches in the bedpost. ELLE: Come on. JM: Whatever. I guess that happens for periods of time. But they were very short. Once you become famous, being single becomes a liability. ELLE: How so? JM: In the age of camera phones and screenshots and Twitter\u2026. At the end of the day, I want to share my life with somebody, you know? I want picture albums. I want to look back at our time together. And I also want kids. And if you want kids, then you want marriage. ELLE: Do women ever underestimate your intelligence because of your looks? JM: All the time, but it makes it easier to know what they&amp;#039;re about. And I can use that [assumption] to surprise the audience. These characters I play? The shirtless dude doing pull-ups in a park? It&amp;#039;s a chapter of my career. I did Ibsen and Chekhov for years. Obviously I didn&amp;#039;t get the kind of recognition I have now. Somebody once told me, &amp;quot;You ride the horse the direction it&amp;#039;s going.&amp;quot; ELLE: If I asked all the women you ever dated to agree on something about you, what would they say? JM: Oh, man. How do I answer that? Let me put it to you this way: There&amp;#039;s nobody that I&amp;#039;m afraid to run into on the street. I&amp;#039;ve always tried to make sure that I left them in a gentlemanly way. And left them better off than when I met them. Web exclusive: A few extras from Mickey&amp;#039;s interview with Joe. Apparently Magic Mike gave him more than a good nickname. ELLE: You studied acting at Carnegie Mellon. What were the women like there? JM: I went to a school that&amp;#039;s predominantly computer science and engineering. So, there&amp;#039;s a real shortage of hot girls, let&amp;#039;s say. ELLE: So what&amp;#039;d you do about that? JM: Every weekend the drama department would have parties. The 20 hot girls on campus? All of them were in the drama dept. So we&amp;#039;d have somebody standing guard at the door to keep all the computer science guys out. We had to guard our women at all times. ELLE: When you first moved to L.A., you got kicked out of your apartment for not paying your rent. Where would you take women when you had no money? JM: The reason I couldn&amp;#039;t pay my rent wasn&amp;#039;t because I had trouble balancing my checkbook. The reason I couldn&amp;#039;t pay my rent was because I was one of the worst drinkers you&amp;#039;d ever seen in your life. ELLE: Is there something you said to a woman that led you to get sober? JM: I quit because that thing inside of me that was driving me to drink that way was causing me so much pain that I was starting to get afraid for my own life, and my own health. It wasn&amp;#039;t necessarily one instance. It was a lot that had piled up. ELLE: Your stripper moves were pretty good. Can you still do them? Do women ask for a demonstration? JM: I get a lot of requests. Shit, that movie is one of the best things that ever happened to me. When I&amp;#039;d be out-and-about at a club and the music would come on, I was never the guy that was gonna dance. But after Magic Mike\u2014I have like two or three go-to moves. That&amp;#039;s what Magic Mike gave me. ELLE: Did you have a phase where you were going to strip clubs? JM: [Laughs] I wouldn&amp;#039;t say I had a problem. It wasn&amp;#039;t a habit. But I&amp;#039;m an average guy. I wasn&amp;#039;t the dude who was gonna sit at the stage and dump all my paycheck into the girl. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a13846/joe-manganiello-interview/>