What The Cast Of The Room Looks Like Today
There are bad movies, and then there is The Room, the crap-tastic melodrama from self-described "visionary" Tommy Wiseau. The 2003 independent flick has turned into a cult hit over the years, attracting enthusiastic fans to interactive midnight screenings a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show and inspiring the upcoming 2017 biopic, The Disaster Artist, about the making of the film. Called "the Citizen Kane of bad movies," The Room left a (oh hi) mark on its cast. Here's what they've been up to in the years since. The suspense is tearing us apart, Lisa!
Mike Holmes - Mike
Mike "me underwears" Holmes, who also goes by the first name Scott, gifted audiences with an "O face" worthy of a standing O in The Room when his character, Mike, breaks into Johnny's house with girlfriend Michelle to have sex. Holmes was also supposed to play drug dealer Chris-R, but the part went to Dan Janjigian instead. Perhaps due to embarrassment over the film, Holmes has essentially gone off the grid. He's appeared as a zombie on The Walking Dead and done a few episodes of comedian Chris Gethard's public access show as well as appearing in a documentary on The Room called Room Full of Spoons. Here's hoping wherever Holmes currently is, he's enjoying himself as much as Mike eating chocolate off Michelle at Johnny's house.
Dan Janjigian - Chris-R
Like pretty much everyone else on set, Janjigian was a complete newbie to film acting. In fact, The Room was his very first audition. Wiseau had been having difficulties casting the part of aggressive and imposing drug dealer Chris-R. Initially, he was going to have Mike Holmes also play Chris-R but in disguise, thinking the audience wouldn't notice, but Greg Sestero talked Wiseau out of it.
Instead, the actor originally cast as Mark (before Wiseau replaced him with Sestero) suggested his 6'3" former Olympian roommate, Dan Janjigian, play the part. Ironically, Janjigian is generally singled out by fans as the best performance in the whole film despite never having acted before. When he saw the finished film at the premiere, he was worried he'd actually been in "a porno." Weirder still was the mob of "fans" who asked for the cast's autographs at the premiere. Janjigian told Huffington Post, "It was so evident that someone had just hired people to come in and do all that."
Janjigian now lives in Austin, Texas and works as a national speaker for sales agents and managers, specifically in leadership training, something drug dealer Chris-R definitely didn't struggle with. Though he no longer acts, Janjigian reunited with his co-stars for The Room Actors: Where Are They Now and was at the SXSW premiere of The Disaster Artist, which he loved.
Kyle Vogt - Peter
"There's too many weirdos there," Kyle Vogt's psychologist character, Peter, says to Johnny and Mark at one point, but he may as well have been talking about the entire movie. In his few scenes, Vogt seemed to serve as the voice of the audience, making statements about Lisa's sociopathic behavior and nearly getting thrown off a roof while taking Mark to task for smoking pot. It's amazing the actor even remembers his experience making the film since he had an accident on set one day and was forced to film a scene with a concussion because Wiseau wouldn't let him leave set. But he did leave the shoot early due to other film commitments, leaving Wiseau to replace him for the scenes Vogt hadn't yet shot.
Vogt is one of the few actors from the cast whose resume extends beyond The Room, appearing mostly in a lot of shorts though he had a small role in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War. He's also done some work as an assistant director as well as regularly appearing on a livestream Dungeons & Dragons game show called Maze Arcana. Vogt keeps in touch with his Room co-stars and appears at fan events for the film.
Greg Ellery - Steven
Greg Ellery's character, Steven, is probably better known as "Who's THAT guy?!" due to him suddenly appearing out of nowhere during the climactic party scene towards the end of the film and yelling at various characters about how they're about to ruin everything. If you wondered about where the man who "feels like he's sitting on an atomic bomb" came from, it's very simple: he's Peter's replacement. When Kyle Vogt had to leave the shoot early before all his Peter scenes were in the can, Wiseau re-cast the role with Ellery. However, rather than re-shoot all of Vogt's scenes with Ellery as Peter, Wiseau just had Ellery do the remaining Peter scenes/dialogue with no explanation as to who the character was. The result is equally baffling and hilarious.
Ellery has done a few projects here and there and reunited with his Room co-stars for Robyn Paris' mockumentary. Given the absence from social media and the public eye, it looks like Steven returned to wherever it is he mysteriously came from.
Carolyn Minnott - Claudette
Carolyn Minnott's character is responsible for one of the funniest moments of the already unintentionally hilarious film, casually telling onscreen daughter, Lisa, "I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer." We'll never know if Claudette lived or died since the subplot was dropped as soon as it was introduced, but Minnott herself had a real life or death scare during the making of The Room.
Minnott was set to shoot one of her scenes with co-star Juliette Danielle on a particularly hot day. Wiseau had initially refused to buy an air conditioner for the studio, forcing the actors to work in 94 degree heat. Minnott wound up passing out from heat stroke and had to be taken to the hospital by co-star Greg Sestero. The ER nurse asked, "What are you doing at your age, passing out in the heat?" Minnott replied, "I'm working on a movie." It was her film debut, and it could have killed her.
More bad luck came her way following the disastrous premiere of the film. She was forced to get a rental car after she found her own Cadillac had been broken into. Minnott told the Huffington Post, "I was certain that this thing would go straight to video and wind up on a Blockbuster shelf somewhere gathering dust." But like Minnott's character, the film continues to live on. She hasn't done much acting since The Room, but she keeps in touch with her co-stars.
Philip Haldiman - Denny
The Arizona native Philip Haldiman had been waiting tables in L.A. when he landed an audition for The Room, where he already sensed Wiseau was not very experienced. "It was basically an improv, " Haldiman told Daily Grindhouse, "there was a couple sitting on the couch, and I would be on the sidelines, and 'Be Crazy!' was the only direction I got."
Things only got weirder once the 24 year-old was hired to play 18 year-old "troubled youth" Denny. Wiseau never gave the cast full scripts, instead giving them their sides for each day's shoot, which forced the cast to come up with their own ideas about their characters. Haldiman recalled, "There were a couple of times when we all got together and tried to piece together all of our scenes to make a cohesive script. And there was never any cohesiveness." Which explains why Denny's drug subplot is introduced and then dropped faster than the footballs he's always tossing around with Johnny.
Haldiman did a few low-budget films after The Room but wound up moving back to Arizona and becoming a journalist. He works as an editor for Independent Newsmedia Inc and created a comic book series called My Big Break about his life in L.A. before, during, and after making The Room. Haldiman remains close with his Room co-stars, telling LAist, "Like being in the strangest of fraternities, The Room provided its own bizarre form of hazing that could have only brought us closer."
Robyn Paris - Michelle
By the time Robyn Paris auditioned for The Room, filming had already begun. She saw an ad in Backstage and was the first to arrive at the open call, chatting with Wiseau before the other actresses showed up, which she thinks is what landed her the role.
Her first day on set, Wiseau handed her five pages and said, "We are shooting this in twenty minutes." It was the infamous "chocolate is the symbol of love" scene, and she wound up wearing the same clothes she had arrived in. Paris has nothing but fondness for the experience, which often made her cry with laughter, including during the film's premiere where she sat right behind Wiseau. "I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen," she told The List, "there was so much at the premiere that I didn't know about because I was only in these specific scenes and I hadn't seen the whole movie."
Paris acted in a few more things following The Room, but she eventually went back to school at UCLA and got her MFA in screenwriting, which is her main focus now. In 2016, she reunited with her co-stars for a mockumentary she wrote and directed called The Room Actors: Where Are They Now. Paris has kept a sense of humor about the whole thing, telling Backstage, "People often ask me, 'Would you appear in The Room again if you had to do it all over?' My sincere answer is: Yes."
Juliette Danielle - Lisa
Just 22 at the time of filming, Juliette Danielle was assured her her nude scenes with Wiseau would be shot "tastefully." She had moved with her mother and sister to L.A. in 2001 and was brand new to acting when she was cast as Lisa, Johnny's manipulative "future wife" and the woman who was tearing him apart. Like most everyone else who worked on the film, she thought, "Oh people are never going to see this." Danielle didn't see the finished film until the premiere and was mortified by the lengthy sex scenes. She told the Huffington Post, "I drank so much champagne to try and deal with my feelings."
After the infamy of The Room, Danielle "went into hiding," per her website, re-emerging for a handful of low-budget films and webseries starting in 2013. She told Alabama.com, social media helped her realize how much people love The Room and that now she uses the film to talk about women's body image issues.
She reunited with many of her fellow Room co-stars for a 2016 mockumentary called The Room Actors: Where Are They Now and is excited about the upcoming Disaster Artist film. Danielle still acts occasionally, but works as a freelance graphic designer, social media and marketing consultant, and Scentsy product rep on the side. She told Huffington Post, "I'm still trying to find ways to make sure something else ends up in my obituary."
Greg Sestero - Mark
The handsome Sestero was 19 when Wiseau first said "oh hi" to him in a San Francisco acting class. The pair forged a friendship, and after Sestero struggled to land acting jobs in Los Angeles for a few years, Wiseau offered him one of the lead roles in The Room. In fact, Sestero was one of the few people who saw the entire script prior to shooting, but he told Rolling Stone, "There was no use in trying to fix or alter it, because he was making it from his standpoint. I just tried to support him getting his movie made...I thought the whole thing was very humorous and kind of endearing." In addition to his role, Sestero was something of a personal assistant to Wiseau on set, making sure everyone was getting paid and helping solve problems.
After The Room, Sestero booked some small roles in mostly B-movies, but his career has largely been defined by the 2003 disasterpiece. He regularly attends fan events with Wiseau, and he's on the brink of possibly the biggest success of his career. Sestero's acclaimed 2013 memoir about the making of The Room and his friendship with Wiseau, The Disaster Artist, is the basis for the upcoming A24-produced film of the same title starring James and Dave Franco as Wiseau and Sestero respectively. It looks like the worst movie ever made may just make for an Oscar-winning film after all. Hahaha what a story, Mark!
Tommy Wiseau - Johnny
Not much is known about the enigmatic Ed Wood-like producer, writer, director, and star of The Room. Tommy Wiseau is likely not even his real name. Though one documentarian claims Wiseau is from Poland, the vampiric cult icon with the unplaceable accent is cagey on the subject. Wiseau had always dreamed of becoming an actor like his heroes Marlon Brando and James Dean. He envisioned The Room like a Tennessee Williams drama, even paying over $5000 a month to advertise it as such on a billboard above Hollywood that also featured a creepy picture of his face. Not exactly cheap, cheap, cheap.
One anonymous cast member told Entertainment Weekly, "He is a nice guy. But he is full of s–t. He was trying to put together a drama. It was basically his stage to show off his acting ability." According to co-star Robyn Paris, Wiseau even had his buttcheeks airbrushed prior to his lengthy sex scenes. To say The Room was a vanity project is clearly an understatement.
But Wiseau has found infamy among the midnight movie set. He regularly appears at screenings around the world often to "riot-level shrieking," as film professor Ross Morin noted to Huffington Post. He's continued directing, acting, and producing his own unique projects while also appearing everywhere from Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job to an Urban Outfitters ad. Wiseau can next be seen in a cameo role in James Franco's Disaster Artist, which he approves of 99.9 percent.