Why Joe Manganiello is reviving noir with The Angel of Vine season 2
Joe Manganiello has an itch the movie industry can’t quite scratch: He loves Los Angeles noir. Take your pick of the classics: Humphrey Bogart’s The Deep Sleep, Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown, the lethal romance in Double Indemnity. All are strapping portraits of the city’s underbelly. But these kinds of movies are now few and far between, Manganiello concedes. So the True Blood and Magic Mike star turned to podcasts to give fans the gritty detective fill with the second season of iHeartMedia’s podcast The Angel of Vine coming Spring 2020.
“Even though I saw Chinatown as a young man, I didn’t fully understand the implications of the L.A water trade, and I found that really fascinating when I got to L.A. These are fictional characters facing real-life circumstances,” Manganiello told EW exclusively. “That’s a sort of metaphor for the surprises in the upcoming season.”
Angel of Vine is coming to iHeartMedia after its first season last year, which followed the story of a present-day investigative journalist Oscar Simons (Oliver Vaquer) who uncovers recordings from a 1950s detective, voiced by Manganiello. The journey leads Simons to startling revelations into a gruesome, unsolved murder.
The podcast was created by actor Oliver Vaquer (Jane The Virgin) and voice director Ryan Martz.
“We wanted to make a scripted podcast that was engaging and entertaining,” says Martz, co-founder of Masterworked Media. “We collaborated with an ensemble of incredibly talented actors and sound designers to make that possible. It was also important to us to make it appealing to the non-fiction listeners in a format that they’d recognize. After launching The Angel of Vine independently, we’re thrilled to join the iHeartPodcast family for our second season. It’s exciting to have such great partners that can introduce our podcast to a whole new audience.”
According to iHeartMedia, season 2 will pick up where season 1 left off in 1959 Palm Springs, California, as a new victim, suspects, and clues lead our main character back to The Angel of Vine story. Manganiello, who is currently gearing up to play Max Fist in the upcoming Archenemy, says the second season will be a sprawling story that reveals more about the dark history of Los Angeles. “The theatrical convention is the crux of the story,” Manganiello says.
For season 2, Kevin Pollak and Patton Oswalt will join returning voice actors Manganiello, Alfred Molina, and Constance Zimmer.
Manganiello also serves as a producer on the podcast. He commended Angel of Vine for giving this type of story an opportunity to thrive when it can take years to get something onto the big screen.
“Recently Edward Norton was on the Joe Rogan podcast talking about what it took to make his film Motherless Brooklyn, which is also from the same era,” Manganiello says. “Hearing how difficult it was to make. I’ve been making two independent films the past two years, both of which took eight years from me reading the script [to] getting it up on screen somewhere. I understand the difficulty. The podcast format allows great ideas and great writing to be birthed much quicker.”
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