‘Modern Family’ star was told to play Manny as ‘Antonio Banderas in a kid’s body’ but only knew him as Puss in Boots

Rico Rodriguez will never forget his audition for Manny on Modern Family — probably because he received feedback with a reference he didn’t get at the time.

Rodriguez’s costar Jesse Tyler Ferguson asked him about it when the former stopped by Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast recently.

Rodriguez explained that he had “very quick success in the industry” to start with, booking all three of his first auditions, and getting close on several subsequent tryouts. But Modern Family was a different story — at least at first.

“My parents always instilled a keep going mentality. Like, ‘Hey. You know what? It’s okay. It happens. We move on. We keep going to the next one,'” he said. “And then Modern Family rolled around, which at the time was [called] My American Family.”

So, Rodriguez went to the first audition, and had a very different vision for the character initially. “I got the audition, and so it was kinda crazy because I had went in with a completely different take on Manny. He was like a player and he was too cool for school. And it was, like, literally the complete opposite to what we know of him today,” he explained.

Rodriguez continued, “And Jeff [Morton, producer] liked it and he was like, ‘That was great.’ But he goes, ‘We see Manny as an old soul, like Antonio Banderas in a kid’s body.’ And I go, ‘Oh.'”

At this point, Ferguson interrupted the conversation to ask if a young Rodriguez knew “that reference.”

“I didn’t know. I was like, ‘Oh, okay. So he wants me to be Puss in Boots,'” he recalled, referring to the animated character from the Shrek franchise voiced by Banderas.

Luckily, Rodriguez still “got a callback” for the role of Manny, even though, as he put it, he “came in with the complete opposite take.”

The producers still made him sweat it out, though. According to the star, he didn’t hear back for “like a month” after the second audition, even though he received good feedback that time. “I was like, ‘Well, okay. That was another one I didn’t get. Whatever’,” he said. “Little did I know they were casting, making sure they were putting Sofia [Vergara] in. They’re casting all the rest of them.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Rodriguez, of course, went on to play Manny for all 11 seasons of Modern Family, which aired on ABC from September 23, 2009, to April 8, 2020.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Ferguson and Rodriguez also discuss who took the latter under his wing on the Modern Family set, and how old he was when he finally learned that he made more than his allowance suggested.