Joe Manganiello's new memoir is not the book anyone expected. Bloodlines, released October 13, 2026, finds the 49-year-old Magic Mike and True Blood star opening up about his split from Sofía Vergara — and sharing one truly bizarre detail: a shaman's claim that one of Vergara's exes had placed a voodoo “curse” on him.
According to excerpts reported by Tyla via Entertainment Weekly, Manganiello recounts a chilling phone call with a shaman who somehow knew intimate details about his severe, mysterious autoimmune illness and intestinal struggles before they were made public. “There were members of my close family who didn't know any of that, let alone some random guy on the phone,” Manganiello writes. “I side-eyed Sofía with a look that was equal parts fear, anger and disbelief.” The shaman allegedly told Vergara: “Someone from your past is still in love with you. He put a voodoo curse on your husband. He did it in New Orleans.”
The curse anecdote is the headline-grabber, but Bloodlines is really a book about identity — family history, health battles fought largely in private, and the strange experience of having a marriage dissected in public after its end. Manganiello and Vergara, one of Hollywood's most-watched couples, finalized their divorce after seven years of marriage, and the memoir is his first extended account of what the split cost him.
Whether readers buy the shaman story or not, Bloodlines confirms Manganiello as one of the more unexpectedly literary voices to emerge from the celebrity-memoir boom: wry, self-aware, and willing to admit that some chapters of a life don't come with rational explanations.
Beyond the headlines, Bloodlines is a family-history excavation — the actor digging into the roots that shaped him long before Hollywood. It's that grounding, reviewers note, that keeps the book from floating off into pure showbiz surrealism, curse or no curse.
Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)