Thomas P. Wiseau ( or ) is an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for writing, producing, directing, and starring in the 2003 film The Room, which has been described by many critics as one of the worst films ever made and has gained cult status. He also co-directed the 2004 documentary Homeless in America and created the 2015 sitcom The Neighbors. Many details about Wiseau's personal life (including his age, source of wealth, and background) remain unverified, and as such have been the subject of intense fan speculation and various conflicting reports. The 2013 non-fiction book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero, as well as its 2017 film adaptation, chronicle the making of The Room and Wiseau's life behind the scenes. Early life Wiseau is very secretive about his early life. In various interviews, he has claimed to have lived in France "a long time ago"; claimed he grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana; and described having "an entire family" in Chalmette, Louisiana. In a 2010 interview with Crikey, Wiseau gave an age which would indicate he was born in 1968 or 1969, but friend Greg Sestero claims in his 2013 memoir The Disaster Artist that his brother's girlfriend obtained copies of Wiseau's U.S. immigration papers and found that Wiseau was born "much earlier" than he claimed, in an Eastern Bloc country in the mid- to late-1950s. In his 2016 documentary Room Full of Spoons, longtime associate of Wiseau, Rick Harper, claims to have researched Wiseau's background and concluded that he is Polish and originally from the city of Poznań, and that he was born in 1955. Wiseau confirmed publicly for the first time, in November 2017, that he is originally from Europe: "Long story short, I grew up in Europe a long time ago, but I'm American and very proud of it." In The Disaster Artist, Sestero asserts that Wiseau revealed to him—through "fantastical, sad, self-contradictory stories"—that as a young adult he moved to Strasbourg, 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 hostel and being traumatised by his mistreatment by the French police, which led him to immigrate to the U.S. to purportedly live with an aunt and uncle in Chalmette. These claims have not been verified.