Filipino-Canadian actor Manny Jacinto is the moment right now, and you can thank his bare-arms-flexing act on The Acolyte for it.
Spoilers ahead for Star Wars: The Acolyte!
If you’ve been a a fan of Manny Jacinto since his days as Jason on The Good Place, Nine Perfect Strangers, and the 2002 rom-com I Want You Back, how does it feel to be a visionary? After The Acolyte episode 5, the internet can’t help but go gaga over the actor’s big reveal on the series. First appearing on the show as Qimir, a smuggler and Mae’s supplier, he is revealed in the recent episode to be Mae’s mysterious “Sith” master.
But it’s not so much the reveal as how it was done that has gotten fans thirsting after Jacinto and his arms. Fictional bad boys are already so desirable, and when they look like that …
There are already fans who have started shipping Qimir with Osha (Amandla Stenberg) after that one scene where she pretends to be Mae, and comparing it to another Star Wars enemies-to-lovers ship, Rey and Kylo Ren, a.k.a. Reylo!
But my favourite reaction to come out of this reveal is some fans only now realizing Jacinto was in Top Gun: Maverick!
This happened after an X user tweeted how people seem to have forgotten that the actor was in that thirst trap of a beach scene in Top Gun: Maverick. It was a blink-and-you-miss-it role, but yes he was absolutely there on that beach, shirtless and running around playing volley ball with other hotties from the cast, including Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, and Glenn Powell.
But there were many who were utterly shocked by this piece of news!
Now, we can’t blame any of them—those who forgot and those who didn’t even know in the first place—because the glimpse you see of him in the beach sequence is probably 80% of his screen time in the film. In fact, many fans expressed just how much they disliked that his role length was that of an extra, and joked how the film itself seemed to forget that he was in it!
Well, I guess all’s well that ends well, because even if a shirtless Manny didn’t get the eyeballs in Top Gun: Maverick, right now Manny Jacinto and his sexy Sith villain act in The Acolyte are being showered with all the attention and fangirling he deserves!
