{"id":57392,"date":"2025-08-09T17:35:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T17:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/57392\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T17:35:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T17:35:03","slug":"freakier-friday-may-finally-give-him-his-leading-man-shot-in-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/57392\/","title":{"rendered":"Freakier Friday may finally give him his leading-man shot in Hollywood."},"content":{"rendered":"

Manny Jacinto has already been a rom-com leading man in the internet\u2019s collective imagination for so long that it\u2019s a little jarring to realize just how large the gulf between the projections and reality had become. Online, the 37-year-old actor has for years now been a subject of TikTok thirst edits and calls for him to nab the lead in the most anticipated book-to-screen adaptations of the day, ever since he rose to fame playing handsome dummy for the ages Jason Mendoza in NBC\u2019s\u00a0The Good Place<\/a>. But offline, his movie career was until recently more memorable for what hadn\u2019t happened for him than what had\u2014despite Jacinto securing a spot in the ensemble of one of the biggest movies of the past five years,\u00a0Top Gun: Maverick<\/a>, none of his dialogue made it into the film\u2019s final cut<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With this week\u2019s release of\u00a0Freakier Friday<\/a>, a sequel to the early-2000s Lindsay Lohan body-swap comedy\u00a0Freaky Friday, the real world is finally catching up to fans\u2019 sky-high expectations for Jacinto\u2019s career. He plays Eric, the love interest of Lohan\u2019s Anna, a fellow single parent she meets when their daughters are paired up in science class and almost destroy the chem lab. Their kids may be struggling with chemistry\u2014their experiment\u2019s blow-up was precipitated by the girls\u2019 intense dislike of each other\u2014but it\u2019s clear from the moment they meet that the adults have it in droves, though who wouldn\u2019t have chemistry with a sexy, British-accented chef? The two go from planning to discuss their daughters\u2019 disagreement in a more intimate setting to engaged over the course of a quick montage, and before we know it, we\u2019ve arrived at the days leading up to their wedding, when the girls still aren\u2019t getting along and Anna and Eric are debating whether their blended family will stay in Los Angeles or head back to Eric\u2019s native England.<\/p>\n

The stage is perfectly set for some good, old-fashioned body-switcheroo shenanigans, but because Jacinto isn\u2019t one of the four\u2014that\u2019s twice as many as in the first movie; inflation, shminflation!\u2014bodies in question (that honor goes to Lohan, the two daughters, and Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising her role as Anna\u2019s therapist mother Tess), he naturally takes a bit of a back seat. But the film still gives him several moments to shine, one in particular being a dance class in which he gets to ape the Patrick Swayze\u2019s most famous sequence from\u00a0Dirty Dancing, and let me just say, he\u2019s got moves. If the same Jacinto loyalists whose delusions eventually landed him this part start fixating on getting him a musical next, I wouldn\u2019t complain.<\/p>\n

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\n Dana Stevens
\n Freakier Friday Is a Delightful Showcase for Two Comediennes\u2014Just Not the Pair You Think
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None of this is all that surprising\u2014fans have long known that Jacinto had it in him. After all, he can act, he has displayed some level of range (his role in the\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0show\u00a0The Acolyte<\/a>\u00a0finally gave him a bad boy turn to add to his reel), and, most importantly for a leading man, he\u2019s preternaturally handsome. So why didn\u2019t it happen sooner? It\u2019s the same question I asked myself last year when\u00a0Adam Brody starred in Netflix\u2019s\u00a0Nobody Wants This<\/a>: When audiences are clamoring to see certain actors in swoony roles, why isn\u2019t Hollywood quicker to cash in on what seems like a no-brainer? In Brody\u2019s case, he appeared to shy away from some of those parts when he was first being offered them out of fear of being typecast as a heartthrob who can\u2019t do much else, and Jacinto too has expressed\u00a0some measure of reluctance<\/a>\u00a0about taking up this mantle. And then there\u2019s the fact that, no matter how much fans say they want rom-coms, it\u2019s still really hard to get one made, especially as a theatrical film\u2014look no further than\u00a0Freakier Friday\u00a0itself, which smuggles its romantic elements under the cover of an intellectual-property-from-20-years-ago surface. On top of all that, executives also no doubt factor Jacinto\u2019s race into casting decisions\u2014he\u2019s a Canadian actor of Filipino-Chinese descent\u2014and it\u2019s not lost on me that this particular big-screen opportunity arrived by way of a film directed by a woman of color, Nisha Ganatra.<\/p>\n

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Freakier Friday\u00a0is more of a family comedy than a straight-up romantic comedy, and Jacinto still deserves the screen time and chewier material that will come with a full-fledged leading man role. But this movie proves that he has the chops to do it, and maybe seeing it will be what it takes for some big-time Hollywood executive to realize as much. It got me thinking of someone else who managed to parlay a family comedy starring Lindsay Lohan into one of the most storied rom-com careers of all time: In the \u201980s and \u201990s, Nancy Meyers was a very successful screenwriter of movies for adults, many of them directed by her then-husband Charles Shyer, but it wasn\u2019t until 1998\u2019s\u00a0The Parent Trap\u00a0that she got a shot to make a movie herself. She hit it out of the park\u2014so much so that\u00a0Freakier Friday\u00a0actually contains a very conspicuous cameo clearly meant to provide fan service to\u00a0Parent Trap\u00a0lovers\u2014and went on to direct some of the most admired romantic comedies of the past quarter-century. If there\u2019s any justice in the world, Manny Jacinto\u2019s rom-com career will follow a similar trajectory, and we\u2019ll be able to say it all started with\u00a0Freakier Friday.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Manny Jacinto has already been a rom-com leading man in the internet\u2019s collective imagination for so long that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75,337,348],"class_list":{"0":"post-57392","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}