When asked to list a few of his favorite leading men, Manny Jacinto has no problem rattling off names: Dev Patel, Pedro Pascal, Steven Yeun, his childhood favorite, Keanu Reeves. “Guys who have not only done great work, but have created work for themselves—those are the guys that I aspire to be,” says Jacinto, looking summery in a white T-shirt and baseball cap while sitting in front of a sunny window in his California home.
For a long time, Jacinto—a Canadian actor born in the Philippines—didn’t consider himself a part of this coalition. Why? “I mean, the lack of people that looked like me when I was growing up,” he says with a shrug. “Even to this day, it’s still not that easy to see people who look like me who are leading men.”
After playing lovable, dim-witted Jason Mendoza on NBC’s The Good Place from 2016 to 2020, Jacinto did more supporting work in the first season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, as well as comedic indies like I Want You Back and Cora Bora. He was largely cut from 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, a move that rankled legions of Jacinto fans. “Especially within the Filipino community, so many families go into the Navy and are super proud,” he says now. “And I think they want to be represented as well.”
Both successes and setbacks reinforced Jacinto’s idea that he’d never quite be cast as the main character. “You start to ingrain ideas of what the world is supposed to be. So when there aren’t that many guys who look like me in media,” he says, “there’s this innate feeling—this negative talk that’s constantly in my head like, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this. This is stupid. This isn’t worth fighting for.’”
That all changes in Freakier Friday, a sequel to 2003’s Freaky Friday that reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as body-swapping mother Tess and daughter Anna. Jacinto plays Eric, the widowed British chef Anna falls for—and, as luck would have it, the father of Lily (Sophia Hammons), the teenage archnemesis of Anna’s daughter Harper (Julia Butters). “Man, am I that old now?” the 37-year-old actor thought upon receiving the role. “I was having a bit of a midlife crisis. But I have gotten to that point where I can play a young dad, so it was eye-opening. I’m not a father in real life yet, but it was good practice. It could take a couple more years.”
Like millions of millennials, Jacinto grew up watching Lohan’s movies. But when he revisited Freaky Friday as an adult, he realized something: “This did not age well,” says Jacinto. Alongside director Nisha Ganatra, he saw Freakier Friday as an opportunity to right “hurtful stereotypes” of the Asian community that appear in the 2003 movie. “That was the first thing that we talked about. We wanted to make sure that we don’t follow those same tropes and have some cultural respect,” he says. “I had nothing but trust that we would stay away from those stereotypes.”
The sequel ups the ante by conjuring a four-way body switch involving Anna, Tess, Harper, and Lily. Jacinto’s Eric is meant to be the calm in that storm. “You just wanted to find a husband character that felt grounded, that has heart, with those small moments of comedy sprinkled in,” he says. “It was a huge compliment that [Ganatra] would trust me, because I didn’t know if I believed that myself.”
