Joe Manganiello has a new cover profile in Men’s Journal, and the start of it is a complete hoot if you know some rudimentary gossip backstory. Basically, Joe and Sofia Vergara were married for years before their quick divorce last year. They had no children together, which was (according to Vergara and everyone else) one of the reasons why they divorced. But during their marriage, Sofia adopted a rescue Chihuahua named Bubbles. Bubbles hated Sofia on sight but Bubbles fell for Joe right away. So much so that when Joe and Sofia divorced, Sofia instantly gave custody of Bubbles to Joe. Well, Bubbles is front and center at the start of the interview. Some highlights:

Bubbles is Joe’s guard dog: Nestled in his lap and accentuating his heft is Manganiello’s best buddy, an 11-year-old rescue Chihuahua mix named Bubbles. She’s wrapped in a blanket, shaking as the sun sets. He cradles her in his tattooed arms that look like they might rip out of his slim-fit T-shirt, Arnold-in-Twins-style, at any moment. Bubbles is over this interview before it begins, registering her displeasure with a high-pitched snarl. I do my best to avoid her gaze, lest she lash out.

He’s classically trained: “I don’t think people had any idea who I was. When I was on True Blood, people would ask me, ‘Did you grow up on a farm?’ No. When I did Magic Mike, people would say, ‘Oh, did you jump out of cakes?’ No.” It’s easy to imagine fans’ disappointment when he tells them that, instead, he got his start studying Chekhov at a conservatory. “It’s a compliment when people think you are your characters. It means they believe you. What’s interesting is now people go, ‘Oh, that’s who he is,’ and they can separate me from my characters.”

Money management: “My first year on True Blood, I lived off my savings. I was paid next to nothing for that first season, and I put all that money into my trainer and a publicist. I didn’t have the money to be spending on Hugh Jackman’s trainer, right? But I just f–king made it happen.”

What Sofia Vergara told El Pais: “I’m newly divorced from my second husband, who I was with for 10 years,” she told Spanish newspaper El País in January 2024. “My marriage broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids and I didn’t want to be an old mom.”

What Joe says about that now: “There’s been a lot said in the press about me wanting a family.” Understanding the gravity of the subject, Manganiello pauses to choose his words. “That’s simply not true,” he says of the El País story. “We did try to have a family for the first year and a half. And we had a huge conversation right out of the gate during the first month we dated. I said, ‘If you’re done with kids, then I understand. Just tell me, and I’ll know what this is, and that’s okay.’ But that wasn’t the case with her. And I swore to her that I would never leave if it didn’t work out. And I didn’t.”

He’s frustrated by the way Vergara framed the split: Character is important to him, he says. Yes, he did want to have kids, but that “wasn’t inevitably why everything ended. It’s because two people grew apart, and sometimes that happens.” But the way that fact was distorted, he says, and affected how people thought of him hurts. “To be painted as if I had some sort of midlife crisis, and after nine years, turned to somebody and gave them an ultimatum of, ‘Do this potentially unhealthy thing to your body, or else I’m gone’? That’s never who I was.”

His new girlfriend Caitlin O’Connor: “When you have a bad day, hopefully you have a good partner in life,” he tells me.

[From Men’s Journal]

The stuff about Sofia… I’ve been on her side throughout this, but I will say that I find Joe’s side pretty credible too. Sofia was reticent about having another child, but I also think she was in the habit of telling men what they wanted to hear, if that makes sense. Like, her psycho ex Nick Loeb wanted to force her to have his baby and his legal campaign has been completely unhinged, but that being said, at one point in their relationship, they did plan on having children and they did make those embryos. I think it’s very possible that when Sofia was in her early 40s, she said “sure, we can try to have a baby” to Joe and then she wasn’t that disappointed when it didn’t happen. Anyway, I don’t think Sofia and Joe are bad people, but they fell apart and the baby thing was a convenient way for Sofia to address what was probably a much more complicated situation.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.