Manny Jacinto Talks Amazon’s Nine Perfect Strangers

A UBC grad is among the stars of a mysterious new Amazon Prime hit

Born in the Philippines, raised in Richmond, Manny Jacinto actually trained to be an engineer, earning his degree from UBC. But he just couldn’t shake that acting bug, and in recent years, the choice to pursue his passion has borne fruit, with a breakout role on afterlife sitcom The Good Place, where he played the dopily departed Jason Mendoza for all four seasons. These days, Jacinto can be seen on the latest collaboration between Big Little Lies dream team David E. Kelley and Nicole Kidman, who are once again adapting a novel by author Liane Moriarty. This one finds an array of troubled souls converging at an Australian self-help retreat, run by mysterious guru Masha (Kidman); Jacinto plays Yao, one of Masha’s “wellness consultants.”

TV Week: What do you think is the particular appeal of Liane Moriarty’s work?
I think what Liane does best is gripping the audience in regards to who these characters are. With Big Little Lies, with Nine Perfect Strangers, there are multiple characters, multiple facets to these characters, and she’s able to give them depth, give them heart. We stick with these characters and we are invested in terms of what they go through as a group. Especially with Nine Perfect Strangers. I think that’s her bread and butter—being able to hook us in with who these people are and then once she’s done that, she’s like, “Okay, let’s go for a ride and see what all these characters can tolerate with each other.” [Laughs]

This show is a little tough to pin down, genre-wise. But would you say that, on some level, it’s commenting on “wellness culture”?
When you ask that question, the first thing that comes to mind is the line of wellness and the abuse of power… NXIVM—what happened with the female actors in Vancouver—a lot of them were in a very vulnerable place in their lives and they needed direction or support and leadership and they wanted to find a way to self-improve. So they found themselves in this organization, this group. I guess what I’m trying to get at with what we’re trying to tell is: where does the line fall in terms of when self-improvement is for good, for actual enlightenment, and when does it fall to the darker side of abuse of power and everything that isn’t enlightenment, and more so through greed and selfishness?

You’re best known for playing Jason on The Good Place, who is such a distinctive weirdo. Are you excited here to show people something entirely new?
I was very excited and also grateful, because Jonathan Levine [series director], Liane [Moriarty], Nicole [Kidman], Bruna [Papandrea, producer]—all those people involved behind the scenes—saw that I could handle a character that was very different from Jason Mendoza, that was a lot more grounded and put-together. Just the fact that they trusted me with that was huge. I didn’t want to let them down. So it was all the feelings: I was excited, I was anxious, I was scared. But it was an experience that I was definitely looking forward to, to be able to exercise a different muscle.

Given the rollercoaster that the entertainment industry can so often be, was there ever a part of you that considered getting into something a little more stable, a little more predictable?
Fortunately enough for me, I experienced that stableness. I went to school for engineering, I worked as an engineer and stuff… and I looked around me and saw the older engineers, and I saw that they weren’t the most happy and healthy and I didn’t necessarily want that for myself. If anyone uses their imagination, you can see what your future will be like in 30 years if you stick to that path. I saw that path and I didn’t like it, so I pursued this thing that I was so obsessed with, which was the arts and dancing and acting, and I couldn’t let it go. And yeah, obviously there are going to be times where I’m like, “Is this really worth it? Is this gonna work out?” But for myself anyway, I was like, “Okay, give me five years. In five years, if I haven’t improved at all, then I’ll go back to what I was doing in engineering, in that nine-to- five job”… But fortunately, things were moving forward.

Nine Perfect Strangers streams Fridays on Amazon Prime Video