Joe Manganiello Reveals Being Cast as Deathstroke in Ben Affleck's Batman Movie Motivated Him to Overcome Near-Fatal Health Crisis

Actor Joe Manganiello has shared a hellish story about how being cast as Deathstroke in Ben Affleck's scrapped Batman movie motivated him to overcome some drastic health issues.

The Hollywood Reporter has shared an excerpt from Manganiello's new memior, titled Bloodlines, where he shares the nightmare-ish situation he was dealing with when he was cast as Deathstroke. The actor was set to play the villain in a Batman film directed by and starring Ben Affleck in the late 2010s. As it turns out, Manganiello was suffering from a ton of health issues that nearly killed him around the time of his casting.

The actor revealed that he collapsed on the set of a Seal Team Six mini-series in 2016, resulting in an extended hospital stay so doctors could discern the unexplainable autoimmune disease that was "attacking his thyroid and ravaging his intestines." He experienced rectal bleeding that stained his hospital room, and said that his entire large intestine had been turned to "pus" and was about to explode, which would've been fatal. Doctors had to remove much of it and replaced it with an ostomy bag, which holds digestive waste in a pouch that stays on the outside of his body.

During his recovery, the actor went from 235 pounds to 176 pounds and was struggling with the bag, which would leak and erupt waste in the middle of the night. The entire experience took a heavy mental toll on him, leading to nervous breakdowns. However, he was given a glimmer of hope for a return to normalcy and a chance at advancing his career with the biggest role he'd been offered to date.

Ben Affleck offered the actor the opportunity to play Deathstroke, the lead antagonist in a new standalone Batman film. Manganiello's then-wife Sofia Vergara pleaded for him to not take the job due to his fragile physical state. However, he believed this was a strong movitator to overcome his health issues.

"Sofia couldn’t bring herself to congratulate me on landing the biggest role of my career," reads an excerpt. "She’d just watched me die and come back to life through the marvel of modern science, and I think during my illness part of her had begun to adapt to the traumatic thought of living her life without me. Now, here I was, packing to leave her for an unbelievably high-stakes job that I was in no shape to take. Hard as it was for her to understand, I needed it to survive. The role contained the shred of hope that I might get my life back in some capacity, and I had to believe it was possible."

The actor hid his health situation from Affleck and the crew, which was apparently quite difficult when he went to go for a suit fitting. In order to avoid any leakages or accidents from his ostomy bag, Manganiello avoided eating for 18 hours in order to clear out his digestive system and ensure that the bag was completely empty when he went into his fitting. Had he not, the tight spandex and armor plating for his Deathstroke suit may have compressed his bag to the point of exploding.

Ultimately, it sounds like an extremely dreadful experience. Ben Affleck's Batman film was eventually canceled in favor of a reboot with Robert Pattinson and director Matt Reeves. Affleck later revealed that he walked away from the film due to his ongoing struggles with alcoholism and depression around that time. A close friend reportedly told the actor that although the script was good, he would drink himself to death if he'd moved forward on it.

Affleck did release test footage of Manganiello's Deathstroke during the pre-production process, and Manganiello himself has talked loosely about what that role would've looked like. He described the character as being similar to a "horror movie villain" that was attempting to destroy Bruce Wayne's life as revenge for some unmentioned incident.

“It was a really dark story in which Deathstroke was like a shark or a horror movie villain that was dismantling Bruce’s life from the inside out," Manganiello said in 2020. "It was this systemic thing: He killed everyone close to Bruce and destroyed his life to try and make him suffer because he felt that Bruce was responsible for something that happened to him.”

Joe Manganiello did eventually get to briefly play Deathstroke via two cameos in the theatrical and director's cuts of Justice League. He had hoped to continue playing the role, but it seems unlikely that will ever happen as part of DC's new rebooted universe. In 2021, following his appearance in Zack Snyder's Justice League, the actor stated that he had made his desire to keep playing Deathstroke known to the studio.

"It's not up to me, but I have made it clear that I would do it again. I think everyone knows, because I talked about it, that there was an origin film in the works and there was a treatment that I worked on with the studio for about six months for a Deathstroke origin. All of that story is there, ready to go. Would I do it again? Yeah, I've made it clear that I would, so it's up to the studio. And if that's a priority for them, then yeah, absolutely I would do it."