As a child of the '70s, Pittsburgh native Joe Manganiello was a little young to appreciate The Smiths when the British rock band's debut album dropped in 1984. 

Even though the brand broke up just three years later, The Smiths were still a force when he got to Mt. Lebanon High School in the early '90s.

"The Mt. Lebanon High School theater club was very much into The Smiths," Manganiello said. "When I started crossing over from athletics into doing plays my senior year, I got a ton of tapes with Smiths songs on them and all the other great indie bands of the time. That was the music I listened to during that very formative period."

His appreciation for Morrissey, Johnny Marr and The Smiths' discography came in handy when the actor took on the role of radio DJ Full Metal Mickey in "Shoplifters of the World," a film about how the youth of Denver reacted on the night in 1987 when The Smiths called it quits. The movie jumps between four friends having a wild evening and Manganiello's character being taken hostage at gunpoint by a record store clerk (Ellar Coltrane) who forces him to play The Smiths' entire oeuvre of songs.

As the film states up front, it's based on the "true intentions" of a Denver teen who planned to forcefully take over a radio station but didn't go through with it. Manganiello first read the script for "Shoplifters of the World" 10 years ago. After numerous stops and starts, the completed film was finally released last month and is currently available on VOD and digital.

"It was a noble cause to get this movie made, and I just loved the script," he said. "I loved my character and the interactions between Full Metal Mickey and Dean, and the fact they meet in the middle and come out of the night as friends having kind of gained insights from each other."

The first thing that stands out about Full Metal Mickey is his look, from his Lemmy Kilmister-inspired handlebar mustache and ponytail — all Manganiello's real hair, for the record — to his cross earring to the metal-inspired patches all over his vest. Manganiello said that in addition to The Smiths offering 20 songs for use in the film, Ozzy Osbourne let them use "Bark at the Moon" and Kiss' Gene Simmons allowed them to blow up a mug with his face on it.

Motor-mouthed Mickey seems a departure from the more brooding characters Manganiello has played in everything from HBO's "True Blood" to DC villain Deathstroke in the recently released "Zack Snyder's Justice League." But not to him: "Clearly, you've never seen me do Shakespeare," he said.

"I think the associations that some people have with me or some of the boxes I've been put in are really the opposite of how I see myself. I'm not surprised, I get it. But we didn't just hang out and memorize lines and smoke cigarettes at Carnegie Mellon (University)."

In fact, the CMU grad recalled being obsessed with the works of Spalding Gray in college, and he got to hang out with artist Henry Rollins after he did a three-and-a-half hour spoken-word performance on the Oakland campus.

When casting directors didn't give Manganiello a shot at varied roles, he created them for himself. He and his brother Nick produced the 2019 baseball flick "Bottom of the 9th" and 2020 action romp "Archenemy," as well as "Shoplifters of the World" with RJLE Films.

In the end, he's really only in half of the movie, as his character never leaves the radio station. But it's enough time to develop the characters, he said.

"There's something that Mickey has to learn from Dean and vice versa."

There's one particularly emotional monologue by Mickey that Manganiello said was cut from the film's final script. Unbeknownst to director Stephen Kijak or anyone else on set, he still delivered this meditation on Mickey's pain.

"It was the center of the overlap between the two characters," he said. "That was the moment of change in Mickey. I needed it in there."

"Shoplifters of the World" came out shortly after Snyder's "Justice League" redux, and Manganiello has been blown away by the passionate response from comics fans — especially the global "DeatthstrokeHBOMax" hashtag urging Warner Bros. to greenlight a solo adventure for the villain. He hopes Deathstroke fans "get what they want" but is mostly just happy that Snyder "got to finish his vision."

The Pittsburgh-born actor has a few animated projects coming out in the near future, including horror film "The Spine of Night," which recently screened at the SXSW festival; zombie apocalypse TV show "Army of the Dead: Las Vegas"; and "Koati," in which he voices a panther alongside a snake portrayed by his wife, Sofia Vergara.

"I love working with my wife," said Manganiello, who also cast her in "Bottom of the 9th."

"We have great chemistry together. We're both professionals. A lot of times, the difficulties of two people being in a showbiz relationship is that you don't get to see each other. In my case, I travel a lot when I work ... When you're on set together, you don't worry about any of that."