'Top Gun: Maverick' Casts 'Good Place' Star Manny Jacinto

Maverick will be flying in the air with Jake Jortles. The Good Place star Manny Jacinto joined the cast of Top Gun: Maverick on the same day The Good Place's third season started.

Deadline first reported the casting on Thursday. According to the site, Jacinto will star as Fritz, a pilot. He joins other franchise newcomers Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Jon Hamm, Lewis Pullman, Miles Teller, Glen Powell and Monica Barbaro. Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer are returning to play Maverick and Iceman, respectively.

Top Gun: Maverick is the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 film that made Cruise a star. The film is being directed by Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy) and was written by Peter Craig, Eric Warren Singer and Justin Marks. Teller will be playing Bradley Bradshaw, the son of the late Nick "Goose" Bradshaw, Anthony Edwards' character from the first film.

Outside of The Good Place, Jacinto starred in an episode of The Good Doctor last season and the Canadian series, The Romeo Section. He stars in Drew Goddard's Bad Times at the El Royale with Chris Hemsworth, which hits theaters on Oct. 12.

On The Good Place, Jacinto stars as Jason Mendoza, the dim-witted wannabe DJ from Jacksonville, Florida who considers himself the world's biggest Jacksonville Jaguars fan.

Jacinto is not much like Jason in real life. In an interview with GQ, he said part of his personality is more like William Jackson Harper's character, Chidi, who overthinks everything and is a moral philosophy professor.

"If I ran into myself maybe seven years ago and told myself that I was gonna be an actor, that I'd be in L.A. working at Universal Studios with these amazing people, I'd be like, 'Get out of here. There's no possible way,'" Jacinto told GQ. "I think things just changed, things evolved, and one part of my Chidi personality is that I get very obsessed with things. Especially things I get interested in. Once acting hit me, once that bug hit me, I just…took the jump and dove right in."

Jacinto and Jason do share at least one common interest: dancing. He told GQ he was in a dance group in Vancouver, and his team even competed in a Las Vegas hip-hop dance event.

New episodes of The Good Place air on NBC at 8:30 p.m. ET. As for Top Gun: Maverick, it hits theaters on June 26, 2020, 34 years after the original film opened.

Photo credit: Colleen Hayes/NBC