Joe Manganiello recalls the time he learned Sofia Vergara was single. The actor appeared on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show to promote his new series Moonhaven. During their conversation, Manganiello opened up about the time he showed Vergara his People magazine placement as “Number One Bachelor in the World.”
Manganiello also revealed that Jess Cagle gave him a heads up that Vergara was single. “For people that don’t know, Jess [Cagle] put me on the cover of People as the ‘Number One Bachelor in the World,’ and someone put their arm around me and said, ‘Kid, that’s not gonna last for very long.’ And they were correct because I was hitched up very shortly after that. So, it was more like a magnet,” the actor joked.
© Michael Rozman/Warner Bros.Cagle later asked Joe what he did to “lock it up” with the Colombian actress.
“Well, so what, when we went on our first date when she was in New Orleans. So I flew to New Orleans and took her out, and it was a great first date,” he revealed. “And I went back out to work for a couple of weeks on the road. And then after those two weeks, I came back to New Orleans, but to see her again.”
According to Joe, for his second encounter with Vergara, he had planned to stay in New Orleans for a week. “At that point, I had passed through an airport, and the People magazine was on the cover that week. And so when I wound up seeing her again for the second time, I just said, ‘Look,’” Joe explains, highlighting that “she was in a long-term relationship.”
© Sofia Vergara“‘Look, you might need to be single. And I understand that. Now I can’t promise you I’m going to be there at the end of your self-discovery process. But like, if you need to be single, I’ll, I’ll understand. I’ll deal with it. Life will go on,’” Manganiello told Vergara.
“I said, ‘But before you make your answer, hold on.’ And I reached into my bag, and I pulled out the People magazine with me as the ‘Number One Bachelor in the World.’ And I put it down on the table, and I said, ‘Numero Uno.’ And then, I slid it across the table to her,” he explains. “And, and she picked up the magazine, she started flipping through it, and I said, ‘You know, you’re skipping my interview. That’s my article.’ She said, ‘Yeah, I wanna see who else is on the list.’“
Joe Manganiello also spoke about the first time he saw Sofia. “Well, I saw her; I had seen her years before at, we were presenting back-to-back at an MTV Music Awards, like in 2010 or something, you know?” he said. “Yeah. We’d seen each other around town.”
Jess Cagle also mentioned the time both actors saw each other at the White House. “Joe being a perfect gentleman was, she was with someone else. And so when we were at the White House Correspondents Dinner, we just kind of followed her around. But you didn’t… I mean later in the night, I think you said, ‘hello,’ but we, you kept your distance respectfully,” Jess reveals.
© GettyImages“I mean, who wants to get into a fight in a tuxedo, you know? It’s not a good look,” Joe says. “At the White House. ‘Who invited that guy?’ ‘Oh, Jess did. Right.’ Now it’s like a whole big scandal. So yeah. I mean, it was kind of like, ‘Alright, you know, yeah. That guy was there.’ But Jesse Tyler Ferguson brought her over to me and made her say ‘hi’ to me or something,” Joe says.
© GettyImages“I was like, ‘Hi,’ you know. I was like, ‘You know, how’s it going? Like your fiancee is over there, what are you doing right now?’ You know? Like, so it was one of those, but then Jess, you found out that she was broken up with the guy at the time and, and you were going to go public with it on People. And you sent me an email that said, ‘We’re about to,” he said. “And that’s, that’s what I needed. I had, I had a head start.”
The couple first went public with their relationship in July 2014 and he popped the question that same year on Christmas day. They planned their lavish wedding at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida in 2015 and the guest list included names like Channing Tatum, Reese Witherspoon, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, per Vogue. Vergara wore an embroidered Zuhair Murad couture gown and Manganiello kept it classic in a black John Varvatos tuxedo.
