From The Good Place to Star Wars, I didn't know Manny Jacinto. But neither do you

You never want to head into an interview unprepared. But walking up to my conversation with Manny Jacinto, for the first time, I think I had the opposite problem. 

Because while the actor has already more than made the rounds — first turning heads as a loveable doofus in the NBC sitcom The Good Place before moving on to trade lines with Nicole Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers and now landing a pivotal role in Star Wars: The Acolyte — I knew him from something else. 

In this moment, he's leaning back under studio lights, prepping for what was then the still days-away June 4 premiere of The Acolyte — the franchise's gamble to draw in a younger audience, shifting the setting to roughly 100 years before the main prequels — and with a cast, crew and characters comprised of women, people of colour and 2SLGBTQ+ people. 

Actually sitting across from him — his almost independently famous good looks and nonchalant, disarming Keanu Reeves charm on full display — I decided to let the penny drop on what I knew.

"Is that you?" he asks, laughing at the picture on my phone. "Oh my gosh, man."

I'd just shown him a rather embarrassing-for-us-both screenshot of The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story, a biopic about actor Dustin Diamond.

Somehow, both Jacinto and I ended up there — me as a background actor with an unfortunate haircut and general aimlessness, and Jacinto an actual actor who was merely playing an extra named Eric, Diamond's stereotypical rough-around-the edges on-set friend who virtually strong arms him into alcoholism.

But that was far from the end of our intersections. We both attended the University of British Columbia at the same time — he gained a civil engineering diploma and ring he still fears ever being forced to use: "It's in the cupboard right now," he said, only half joking. "I'll bring it out when I need to, when I need to build a bridge."

Because we were both dancers in a relatively stratified community, we must have competed against each other numerous times. We confirmed one head to head in 2012 where I remember his crew, though I never actually met him. They were the impossibly professional, self-choreographed trio in ties; we were the oversized group flailing to Grease in matching letterman's jackets. 

I hung around as an extra on Once Upon a Time, the show where he got his first break as Quon, a sort of middle-man from China who introduces a character to a mystical healer named The Dragon. 

Before all that, during the 2010 Olympics, all the aspiring performers were making the most of the influx of tourists. While I was performing dancing at Spirit Square, Jacinto was just a few kilometres down the road making a case for his talent (and, it turns out, nearly breaking his nose during a flubbed backflip, before taking public transit back home in a blood-stained shirt as fellow riders tried not to stare.)

What strikes me isn't that until this moment, we'd shared so many rooms without ever turning to meet. It was the fact that, despite crawling though the same muddy ratlines aimed somewhere South near Hollywood, I had only just discovered he was Canadian.   

"I thought that I would be in Vancouver acting for a lot longer than I would have," he explained, having moved to British Columbia from Manila shortly after he was born. "But you know, I made the trek down to L.A., and then, luckily, my first trip down to L.A., like something hit and then it just kind of snowballed from there.

"I mean, I try and rep Canada whenever I can, but yeah, it's kind of maybe a little secret sometimes."