‘Magic Mike’ Star Joe Manganiello Opens up About Life-Changing Surgery in New Memoir

Years of hospital stays, inconclusive tests, and a life-saving operation pushed the Hollywood heartthrob to his breaking point. Now, he's sharing how he finally found relief after nearly a decade of suffering.

Joe Manganiello is getting vulnerable. The "Magic Mike" star has opened up about the harrowing health scare he endured while hospitalized for a mysterious autoimmune disease that plagued him for the better part of the last decade.

In his new memoir, "Bloodlines," Manganiello recalled losing 60 pounds, undergoing countless colonoscopies, and enduring an emergency surgery in 2016 that left him unable to use the bathroom normally.

"It happened to me, and it's the truth, and I have all the scars to prove it," Manganiello told People of the ordeal, for which he never received a conclusive diagnosis. "[Autoimmune] conditions are a dumping ground for things [doctors] don't understand. They start running you through this gauntlet of drugs."

Manganiello says he was prescribed medication for nerve pain, as well as drugs used to treat Crohn's and colitis, but "none of them worked." His illness began around the same time he married "Modern Family" alum Sofia Vergara.

In an excerpt from "Bloodlines" obtained by People, Manganiello recounted lying in a hospital bed in agony, convinced he might not make it through another night, while Vergara slept in the same room.

"I felt a swell in my abdomen — a signal that I was moments from hemorrhaging blood all over the sheets. Grimacing in horrific pain, holding the side rail for stability, I swung my legs to the floor," he wrote.

The "True Blood" alum attempted to make his way to the bathroom, but the pain turned every step into a struggle. By then, he had been hospitalized for two weeks, and his deteriorating health was taking a toll on his relatively new marriage.

"Sofia didn't sign up for this. She'd married the 'Number One Bachelor in the World,' one of 'Men's Health's 100 Fittest Men of all Time,' not the sickly, bleeding zombie I had become. I stopped to rest and looked in the mirror," Manganiello wrote.

"I was beyond gaunt, and my skin was translucent, like thin newspaper. This is it, I thought. I don't have anything left. I won't last another day. I am going to die tonight," he continued. The next morning, doctors rushed the actor into emergency surgery.

With nothing on any of his tests or MRIs to explain the pain and bleeding, doctors made a last-ditch effort to find answers through exploratory surgery, hoping to see for themselves whether the scans had missed anything.

They discovered that his large intestine was severely infected. Doctors operated on him for 10 hours, saving his life, but the procedure left him relying on an ostomy bag indefinitely.

Over the next seven years, Manganiello was in and out of hospitals, and his health struggles increasingly weighed on his marriage. He and Vergara eventually divorced in 2023. Searching for answers, he started exploring options outside of conventional medicine.

At one point, his quest for relief once took him to a Cuban medicine man, but Manganiello credits a Santa Monica shaman with finally helping him heal. According to the shaman, the root of his suffering was generational trauma.

The actor's great-grandmother lost nine of her children during the genocide in Armenia, while his grandmother lived with lupus. Manganiello says that by facing his family's painful history directly, he was able to release the burden he had been carrying.

"Whatever chains there were to the past suffering of my ancestors, they were completely broken. There's not an ounce of fear in me about moving forward with my life," he said.

The star later underwent a follow-up surgery to reconnect his digestive tract, and now says he's off medication and symptom-free. "For seven years I thought I was going to be dead the next week," he says. "The world has opened back up to me."