Tommy Wiseau
| Tommy Wiseau | |
|---|---|
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| Occupation | Director, actor, producer, screenwriter |
| Years active | 2003–present |
| Known for | The Room |
| Website | www |
Tommy Wiseau (/wɪˈzoʊ/) is an American director, actor, producer and screenwriter based in the United States. He is best known for The Room (2003), which has been described by many critics as "one of the worst movies ever made" and has gained cult film status. He also directed the 2004 documentary Homeless in America and the 2015 sitcom The Neighbors.
Wiseau is secretive about his early life. In various interviews he has claimed to have lived in France "a long time ago", asserted that he grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, US, and described having "an entire family" in Chalmette, Louisiana. In interviews following the release of The Room in 2003, Wiseau gave an age indicating that he was born in 1968 or 1969. Actor Greg Sestero claims in his 2013 memoir The Disaster Artist that his brother's girlfriend obtained copies of Wiseau's US immigration papers and found that Wiseau was born "much earlier" than he claimed, in an Eastern Bloc country in the 1950s. In his 2016 documentary Room Full of Spoons, Rick Harper claims to have researched Wiseau's background and concluded that he is originally from Poznań, Poland.
In The Disaster Artist, Sestero asserts that Wiseau intimated to him—admittedly through "fantastical, sad, self-contradictory stories"—that as a young adult he moved to Strasbourg, France, where he adopted the name Pierre and worked as a restaurant dishwasher. According to Sestero, Wiseau described being wrongfully arrested following a drug raid at a youth hostel, and being traumatised by his treatment by the French police—an experience that led him to arrange passage to America to live with his aunt and uncle in Chalmette, Louisiana.
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