Manny Jacinto has already been a rom-com leading man in the internet’s collective imagination for so long that it’s 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’s The Good Place. But offline, his movie career was until recently more memorable for what hadn’t happened for him than what had—despite Jacinto securing a spot in the ensemble of one of the biggest movies of the past five years, Top Gun: Maverick, none of his dialogue made it into the film’s final cut.
With this week’s release of Freakier Friday, a sequel to the early-2000s Lindsay Lohan body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, the real world is finally catching up to fans’ sky-high expectations for Jacinto’s career. He plays Eric, the love interest of Lohan’s 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—their experiment’s blow-up was precipitated by the girls’ intense dislike of each other—but it’s clear from the moment they meet that the adults have it in droves, though who wouldn’t have chemistry with a sexy, British-accented chef? The two go from planning to discuss their daughters’ disagreement in a more intimate setting to engaged over the course of a quick montage, and before we know it, we’ve arrived at the days leading up to their wedding, when the girls still aren’t getting along and Anna and Eric are debating whether their blended family will stay in Los Angeles or head back to Eric’s native England.
The stage is perfectly set for some good, old-fashioned body-switcheroo shenanigans, but because Jacinto isn’t one of the four—that’s twice as many as in the first movie; inflation, shminflation!—bodies in question (that honor goes to Lohan, the two daughters, and Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising her role as Anna’s 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’s most famous sequence from Dirty Dancing, and let me just say, he’s got moves. If the same Jacinto loyalists whose delusions eventually landed him this part start fixating on getting him a musical next, I wouldn’t complain.
None of this is all that surprising—fans 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 Star Wars show The Acolyte finally gave him a bad boy turn to add to his reel), and, most importantly for a leading man, he’s preternaturally handsome. So why didn’t it happen sooner? It’s the same question I asked myself last year when Adam Brody starred in Netflix’s Nobody Wants This: When audiences are clamoring to see certain actors in swoony roles, why isn’t Hollywood quicker to cash in on what seems like a no-brainer? In Brody’s 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’t do much else, and Jacinto too has expressed some measure of reluctance about taking up this mantle. And then there’s the fact that, no matter how much fans say they want rom-coms, it’s still really hard to get one made, especially as a theatrical film—look no further than Freakier Friday itself, 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’s race into casting decisions—he’s a Canadian actor of Filipino-Chinese descent—and it’s not lost on me that this particular big-screen opportunity arrived by way of a film directed by a woman of color, Nisha Ganatra.
Freakier Friday is 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 ’80s and ’90s, Nancy Meyers was a very successful screenwriter of movies for adults, many of them directed by her then-husband Charles Shyer, but it wasn’t until 1998’s The Parent Trap that she got a shot to make a movie herself. She hit it out of the park—so much so that Freakier Friday actually contains a very conspicuous cameo clearly meant to provide fan service to Parent Trap lovers—and went on to direct some of the most admired romantic comedies of the past quarter-century. If there’s any justice in the world, Manny Jacinto’s rom-com career will follow a similar trajectory, and we’ll be able to say it all started with Freakier Friday.
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