Manny Jacinto moves on from ‘Good Place’ with calmer roles
Manny Jacinto is ready to move beyond playing “the ultimate himbo.”
For four years on NBC’S afterlife comedy “The Good Place,” Jacinto charmed audiences as the goofy Jason Mendoza, a Floridian who died by suffocation after locking himself in a safe in order to pull off a robbery. Although as episodes went on Jason exhibited growth and some smart moments, Jacinto laughs that he sometimes still gets social media comments focusing on Jason’s simpler traits.
He expresses nothing but kind words and gratitude, both for the team he worked with on that series and for the fan base it has given him. But he also knows that if he was only seen as Jason for too long, he might get stereotyped.
While Jason was on the “more high-energy, chaotic spectrum” of characters, the next TV roles Jacinto worked on are more straightforward, the actor says. He plays Cody, a drug-dealing friend with whom protagonist Lisa (Rosa Salazar) crashes when she moves to Los Angeles in “Brand New Cherry Flavor,” now on Netflix. He’s also in Hulu’s adaptation of “Nine Perfect Strangers” as Yao, right-hand man to Nicole Kidman’s Masha at her wellness retreat, now streaming as well.
That both projects are limited series and adaptations was not intentional when Jacinto was choosing his next roles. (He also has “Top Gun: Maverick” on the horizon.) But the calm, centering nature of both characters, despite the chaos around them, was important to Jacinto.
“I like being the quiet one, and I like having a sense of mystery. It’s my
home base, in a sense, being more still,” he said.
Jacinto booked and started filming “Brand New Cherry Flavor” first, though the COVID-19 pandemic required them to pause and return for reshoots months later, after he had wrapped “Nine Perfect Strangers” in Australia. That character is kept on the outskirts of most of the madness of curses, zombies and vomiting kittens for the majority of the series, serving as a tether for Lisa, and therefore the audience, to a more grounded reality.
In “Nine Perfect Strangers,” Jacinto’s character is in the center of the action and is the “moral compass” for it, he says. He is a former paramedic, whom Masha credits with saving her life years earlier, but he quit that job to join her in her pursuit of building a wellness retreat. Her methods of microdosing her clients without their knowledge, let alone consent, are unorthodox at best — and potentially harmful to their health. While there is a layer of him “being super devoted” to her and “wanting (the retreat) Tranquillum to succeed as best as possible,”
he also knows what they are doing “can go very wrong,” Jacinto says. This gave him additional layers to play because Yao “is definitely struggling with that internally. He’s not really being able to vocalize it; he’s trying to hold himself together.”
With both series, a big part of the appeal for Jacinto was with whom he would be collaborating.
“I looked into Nick Antosca’s work before (‘Brand New Cherry Flavor’),” Jacinto says. “‘Channel Zero’ was just the creepiest thing to me. I can’t articulate the feeling I was getting, but it was disturbing and weird, and he just did so much with a lower budget project, and I was like, ‘Oh man, if this guy can make me feel this way with “Channel Zero,” I can only imagine what he’ll do with the big empire of Netflix.’ ”
“Nine Perfect Strangers” afforded him the opportunity to, for the first real time, sit down and dig into back story with a director (Jonathan Levine). And of course, “when you get a call to play with Nicole Kidman, you go and play; you don’t mess around with that,” he says.