7/19/23 UPDATE: People reported July 19 that Joe Manganiello had filed for divorce from Sofia Vergara two days after they announced their split. Divorce documents obtained by the magazine cited “irreconcilable differences” as the cause of the July 2 breakup, which a source said was specifically about him wanting to have a baby with her when she didn’t want to. The couple indicated in the divorce docs that they have a prenuptial agreement.
Sofía Vergara and Joe Manganiello are breaking up after seven years of marriage. In a joint statement on Monday, the actors asked for privacy.
“We have made the difficult decision to divorce,” they tell Page Six. “As two people that love and care for one another very much, we politely ask for respect of our privacy at this time as we navigate this new phase of our lives.”
Reps for the America’s Got Talent judge, 51, and Manganiello, 46, did not respond to Yahoo Entertainment’s request for comment.
It’s a shocking split, by Hollywood standards, as there have been no tabloid reports of trouble in paradise. They were spotted together just last month, Page Six reports. However, some fans noticed Manganiello’s birthday tribute to his wife last week was rather short. The Modern Family actress also rang in 51 with close friends in Italy, not her husband — or her wedding ring.
A source told Page Six: “Sofía and Joe have been growing apart for a while now and are taking some distance from each other to contemplate their future.”
Manganiello and Vergara first met at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2014. The award winning actress attended the event with her then-fiancé, Nick Loeb. Vergara and Loeb split shortly after and Manganiello said he was eager to make a move.
“I flew to New Orleans and took her out and it was a great first date,” he recalled in July 2022 on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show.
The True Blood star said that Vergara initially wanted to be single after coming out of a longterm relationship.
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“When I wound up seeing her again for the second time, I just said, ‘Look, you might need to be single. And I understand that. Now I can’t promise you I’m gonna be there at the end of your self-discovery process,'” he recalled. “‘But like, if you need to be single I’ll understand. I’ll deal with it. Life will go on.'”
Manganiello then pulled out an issue of People magazine, specifically, the one where he was featured in People’s Sexiest Man Alive issue in 2014.
“I reached into my bag and I pulled out the People magazine with me as the ‘Number One Bachelor in the World,'” he recalled to Cagle. “And I put it down on the table and I said, ‘Numero Uno.’ And then I slid it across the table to her.”
The stunt worked as the two ultimately wed in 2015.
“I knew pretty quickly that I could trust her, and she knew pretty quickly that she could trust me,” Manganiello told People in 2020. “And we’re both the kind of people who are capable of putting the other person ahead of ourselves. I was capable of putting her wishes ahead of mine, whatever they were, and she was capable of doing the same. Once you have that, you don’t let go of it.”
Neither Vergara nor Manganiello have commented on the split.
This story was originally published July 17, 2023.
