- Comic con can take a toll on the best of us,
and sometimes you just wanna relax,
and talk it through so Joe Manganiello,
it's good to see you buddy.
- Great seeing you buddy.
- Where you wanna begin, what's on your mind?
- Ugh, I guess we should start with my parents.
- Well maybe, we should, we don't have,
could we just jump ahead to Comic Con stuff?
- Okay, I mean if you think that's important.
- Well, it's all connected probably,
it all goes back to childhood,
but maybe just for the sake of where we are, you know.
- Okay. - Right?
- Fine, yeah.
- Just keeping our eye on the ball.
- Well I came to Comic Con yesterday.
I had this idea for a street wear company
involving fantasy art. - Right.
- I don't know like you know like '80s fantasy,
which I guess was maybe a difficult time for me.
- And clearly and I don't wanna overanalyze,
but fantasy can be an escape for some people.
- I guess you're right.
- And you know if you're working through stuff as a kid,
and you need to find a place in the world, maybe,
and again I'm not trying to put something on you,
you tell me, that provided a home for you,
a safe place, do yo feel safe in your Death Saves merch.
- I do, I just think.
- Yeah, I thought you do.
- I just think things were better then.
You know it's like the artwork was cooler I think,
Dungeons and Dragons was cool,
you know heavy metal wasn't satanic yet,
I just think it was like, I don't know,
it's just like an easier, cooler time,
and then everything just changed,
and I just wanted to be the way that it used to be.
- I think there's a lot of that in the world now,
we're living in complicated times,
and however we wanna simplify things,
and go back to that happy time as a kid,
that's nothing to feel badly about,
that's an admirable, and I think it's good
that you found an outlet for that,
and you're sharing it with others,
which is great.
- So you're saying,
I should make Dungeons and Dragons great again?
- Oh my god, got to get out of here man,
you got to go do it.
Get to work quick.
- I got to make that into a hat, or something.
- Um.
- All right, okay, here we go, that's fine.
- So Death Saves, Joe Manganiello,
his lifelong dream was to come to Comic Con,
and both be a super hero but also have a street wear line,
and now you can you can the check both boxes.
- Yeah, I don't know if the last one was ever
necessarily a dream until it really was right,
but yeah man, I love old vintage fantasy.
I think things are fractured now,
like we have subgenres of subgenres of subgenres,
and back in the eighties when I was growing up,
you had like six categories to choose from,
and that was it, and there were a lot of things
that used to go together logically
that somehow fractured partly,
even Comic Con, like all superhero fans are over there,
and fantasy fans you're over there,
and no, they should all be together,
and growing up, you're hard pressed to find somebody
who didn't play Dungeons and Dragons,
who also wore a Metallica T-shirt,
who had a glow in the dark Led Zeppelin poster
on their wall, who read Stephen King,
who hung out in comic shops, who played video games,
like it's all the same,
and I started a street wear brand,
try to put everything back underneath one umbrella.
- What was, growing up did you have
a favorite piece of apparel,
or wardrobe, or a shirt or a thing
that felt like this is me, this defines who I am?
- As a kid?
Oh man, I had like, oh you know what it was,
my parents are from Boston,
so I had this T-shirt from Salem,
it was like a witch haunted T-shirt, and I loved that,
like I had a really, I was a weird.
I used to stay up late on the weekends
to watch all the black and white Universal horror movies,
I used to root for Godzilla,
I used to root for Darth Vader, I rooted for Jaws,
and so I just grew up into an adult,
who like weird things and now this is my chance I think
to take all those classic heavy metal album covers,
all those monsters I love growing up,
and then make, hire artists to make artwork out of 'em ,
and then give 'em away to my people.
- I am well acquainted with your love of D&D obviously...
- You've been in my dungeon.
- I've been in the famous...
- I have a really great picture of have you on the table
in my dungeon with tearing Taran Killam and I on top of you,
which I have big sized pictures.
- My career is over already just from hearing about that.
- Be really nice to me.
- Oh god.
- But yes, so you are hard core about your D&D love,
has the addiction become a problem,
does it get in the way of anything?
- Is this an intervention?
Is this why I've been brought here?
- It's fantastic, do you need help?
- My wife thinks I probably need help.
No, I think it's one of those things as a kid
that it's easy to get obsessed
with I think fantasy, and especially like,
like those dragons, that's really the allure to it
and that was why people devour fantasy novels
the way they do to or comic books.
You know I used to read comic book so fast,
I had to start shoplifting them to feed my habit,
which I then I want to say I went back years later
right as an adult and paid back comic bookstores
for everything that I stole.
- That must have been interesting,
I want videotape of that just interaction, this like...
- I have some. - What, you shot it?
- I swear, yeah, and it's funny is on top of the pile,
and I'd just finished shooting Sam Raimi's Spider-man,
but on top of the Power all that,
all the Todd McFarlane's Spider mans,
and I had like you know, it was stuff that I worked on
and grown up to right to work on so.
But I think.
there's something, like I love following my passion,
so like as an artist,
it's all about what I'm passionate about,
where can I follow it, and you know as an artist,
when you're starting out
you're just trying to pay your bills,
and then you can get to a point where you can afford
to start being choosy or then afford to start
putting yourself out there and really pushing for the things
that you wanna see done the way that you want
to see them done, and I've been fortunate
these past couple of years to follow the passion
down the rabbit hole, Dungeon and Dragons,
and I've built this great relationship with them
like I'm writing part of their adventure module
for next year that'll get released,
and working on a graphic novel series
with this great artist, and then I said to them,
I said, "Hey man I wanna make a bunch of cool street wear
"that I would want to wear,
"and that I think that my generation,
"like we would wanna wear,
"and then also what I'm gonna do
"is I'm gonna use it as a history lesson
"to educate all the young D&D players",
'cause D&D is bigger than it's ever been now.
but there's a lot of youngsters that they don't know.
(crosstalk)
But they don't know where all that came from,
and so that's kinda like educating but having fun,
and it's a way for me to go to bed thinking about it,
go back to work.
- Pie in the sky, what do you think,
where should D&D live in the pop culture landscape
in the next few years, five years from now we're talking,
like, you know is it comparable to talk about it
like in film terms like the the MCU,
and what Star Wars has been doing, and like.
- Yes and I've had some conversations with people,
like important people in terms of that kind of stuff
about like what the property is,
and I think what I think that the possibilities are,
and I do think, I think it is,
I mean it's almost 50 years worth
of some of the most brilliant fantasy minds
just creating a library of worlds and modules,
and there's all these amazing stories,
an amazing characters, it just takes the right person,
the right people to unlock all of that,
so there's like an incredible,
it's me saying here's this ungentrified territory
the size of Texas, Alaska, you know,
and let's get in there,
so build it out.
- What do you think the first,
is it just one massive movie, is it like a trilogy,
do you do a TV series,
like if you if you were running D&D industries...
- Sure, which I have thought of.
- It feels like you're getting closer and closer.
- I've thought about it.
- What's the big kind of plant your stake in the ground,
what's the thing to do?
- Well, you know I think that this,
I think that the D&D core audience is very intelligent,
I think they're very analytical in the way that fanboys are,
which is really fun I think,
but I think that they'll go as deep as you allow them to go,
and so with that said, I think it's
I think it's about doing justice to all those,
all those those models and setting it up in a way
that there are infinite Easter eggs,
I think it's a real, I think it's a deep dive,
rather than shallow, its deep rather than shallow,
and so some sort of approach that lends itself to that.
You know the the face of movies are changing quite a bit,
and I think that, and I think a really great way to do that
is TV because you can you have a long form narrative
which is very, lends itself to just the game of D&D.
- Well it seems, like unfortunately Dark Tower
was gonna try that, it seemed like, right,
they were gonna do the films and then had a TV show,
and they didn't, they just didn't get it right.
- I mean would, I mean in your opinion
is that a conceptual issue?
- Well I think it's a,
I think it makes sense for our times,
like I think, no I don't think it's a conceptual issue,
I think it's a conceptual issue of what they did
with that film and try to jam way too much.
- That's what I mean. - Yeah.
- But I think the idea of that format
is actually really intriguing,
and I think we're gonna see more and more of that,
don't you, of like the bordering of the lines and yeah.
- I mean you know I I I spent some time with Kevin Feige,
and I got to like, I had a million questions
that I wanted to know about his approach,
and Marvel approaches,
and one of the things I asked him about was Iron Man,
I was like when you stepped into Iron Man,
did you have a a mega verse plan, and he said,
"No, we were just praying to God that people came out,
"and saw our Iron Man".
- "Let's throw Nick Fury in at the end, that could be cool."
- Yeah , and let's see, but only if we've earned it,
and I think they're just taking a step by step approach,
and I mean as far as Dungeons and Dragons go,
I think it's a fan base that
if you give them something cool,
if you give 'em something that they wanna hang their hat on
or they're proud to say, "That's what it is",
then I think you've done your job.
- You must, I can only imagine you feel the love
when you come here every year,
you've come here many years,
and especially since you got to dip your toe in,
and we at least got to see you,
however the future holds, we got to see a Deathstroke
inhabited by you and what was amazing,
even just in that brief moment,
have you noticed a difference,
have you enjoyed how the fans response of just sort of
what people, even appreciating that,
that you got to do that.
- Yeah, well it's different,
you know the True Blood audience
was the True Blood audience, which is a part of Comic Con,
but its own thing, you know,
and so you know when I came for years repeatedly for that,
it was a certain type of audience,
it was that was that fan base,
which was also at the time like Twilight was running,
so like we were the adult twilight,
we're the twilight that's having sex.
- We go all the way.
- Yeah, full penetration.
So you know, and then every once in awhile,
you get like a "hey, you were Flash Thompson",
like "Hey, you kinda belong here,
"but sort of not", you know "Ha ha",
I mean even Stan Lee would kind of like poke at,
and now, but now like, no it's like full blown fanboy,
because like "Oh man Slade", like "What's up with Slade,
"when's Slade coming, what's Slade doing?"
- So if they're asking,
I'm gonna let them ask the question,
'cause I know you love it when I bring this up,
but what would you say to them,
like when they ask you what's up like?
- I say it's in the works, because it is,
and I, I'd,
really there's nothing further that I can say
without speaking out of school,
'cause you know I'm a part of a team,
I'm a part of a locker room,
you don't talk outside the locker room,
but all I can say is for the hardcore fans,
it's in the works,
they wanna,
they want the character to happen,
it's when he happens...
- And like your time at D&D,
you want it done the right way, I know.
- Exactly, and they do too, yeah, they do too,
I think every everybody's committed to that, so.
- Just as a as a fan, what's the most exciting developments
in comic book movies going on right now,
is there like one film in the MC or the DC properties
that you're most excited about or most intrigued by,
whether it's close to coming to fruition,
or just being announced like the joker movie, whatever,
like what do you think is interesting out there?
- I mean, you know, I'm interested to see where,
I was an X-Men reader growing up,
like that that was my title,
that was, those were, that was my series,
so I'm interested with all the mergers,
or potential mergers, and where the X-Men are going to land,
if they do land in the full blown Marvel,
which it looks like that that is,
how it's gonna happen.
- Have you day dreamed about an X-Men character
that would be right for you or in that universe?
- You know when I was a kid, Wolverine was Glenn Danzig,
you know he was like five foot three exactly,
that is not a possibility for six five guy.
- But hey now we're all bets are off.
- Then Hugh Jackman came along and changed all of that,
so my wife used to call me Wolverine when we met,
she was like, "You're like that Wolverine guy",
I'm like, "Whoa, he's five foot three,
some I'm not really that guy."
- "He's more Bob Hoskins than me, but okay."
- "But thank you very much", you know and then,
but growing up like,
you know Colossus had such a great storyline in Secret Wars,
he had that beautiful healer, he got the girl,
you know whatever, so I always thought he was really fun
of course but he's being played well
by the giant CGI Russian guy.
But somewhere maybe in that universe I think,
I mean there's, I mean if if they move over,
then there's a ton of characters
that are gonna be up for grabs again.
- And it will be interesting to see
when they go back to the well to figure out Wolverine,
cause it's just such a mean a fan favorite, you can't,
like Batman, they're not gonna to be able
to resist leaving that dormant for too long.
- No, but then it's like well, how do you tell that,
and what do you do with that, and do they go back and do it,
because I mean...
- Unless the merger gives them license to reboot
and just sort of like okay.
- Well, Hugh was so unbelievable,
I mean it's not even like trying to replace
Sean Connery's James Bond,
because Sean Connery played 'em, what, six times, I guess.
it's like 10 times, and how do you top Logan...
- I mean he went out on top.
like Logan was maybe my favorite movie of the past,
that and like the new Blade Runner
were like my favorite movies of the past five years yeah,
and then maybe throw in like the first Sicario,
that's a good trifecta.
- I like it, I support those three.
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