Tommy Wiseau

Two undated headshots of Wiseau from his Flickr account

Wiseau maintains a high level of privacy regarding early life.^[5] In various interviews, he has claimed to have lived in France "a long time ago";^[9] claimed he grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana;^[10][11] and described having "an entire family" in Chalmette, Louisiana.^[12] In a 2010 interview with Crikey, Wiseau gave an age which would indicate he was born in 1968 or 1969,^[13] 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,^[14] in an Eastern Bloc country in the mid- to late-1950s.^[15]

In his 2016 documentary Room Full of Spoons, Rick Harper, a longtime associate of Wiseau, claimed to have researched Wiseau's background and concluded that he is Polish and originally from the city of Poznań,^[16] and that he was born in 1955.^[17] 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."^[18][19]

In The Disaster Artist, Sestero asserted that Wiseau revealed to him—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.^[20] According to Sestero, Wiseau described being wrongfully arrested following a drug raid at a hostel and being traumatized 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.^[21] These claims have not been verified.

Sestero stated that after Wiseau lived in Louisiana for some amount of time, he subsequently moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked as a street vendor selling toys to tourists near Fisherman's Wharf. Wiseau supposedly gained the nickname "The Birdman" for his bird toys, which were only popular in Europe at the time; this led him to legally change his name when he became a U.S. citizen to Thomas Pierre Wiseau, taking the French word for "bird" (oiseau) and replacing the O with the W of his birth name.^[22]

Around this time, Wiseau also claims to have obtained a degree in psychology from Laney Community College in Oakland,^[23][24] asserting that he had graduated on the honor roll.^[25]

According to Sestero, Wiseau claims to have worked a variety of jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, including restaurant busboy and hospital worker, and ran a business called Street Fashions USA^[26] at Fisherman's Wharf, employing comedian Aaron Barrett,^[27] and selling irregular blue jeans at discounted prices. He then claims to have eventually purchased and rented out large retail spaces in and around San Francisco^[28] and Los Angeles,^{[citation needed]} making him independently wealthy. A 1994 article in the San Francisco Examiner identifies Wiseau as the owner of Street Fashions.^[29] Sestero states that the idea of Wiseau becoming wealthy so quickly via the jobs he claims to have had is so unlikely that he himself finds it impossible to believe.^[30] Sestero suggests on several occasions that many people involved with the creation of The Room believed the film to be part of some money laundering scheme for organized crime, but Sestero himself considers this unlikely.^[31]

Wiseau claims to have been involved in a near-fatal car crash in California after another driver ran a red light and struck Wiseau's vehicle; as a result, Wiseau was hospitalized for several weeks.^[32] Sestero suggests that this incident was the turning point in Wiseau's life that led him to pursue his dreams of becoming an actor and director, ambitions that he had long neglected while pursuing financial security.^[33]

Wiseau remains private about the details of his personal and family life. In 2017, he told Entertainment Weekly, "I think private life should be private life, the professional life should be the professional life, and that's where I stand, and I have [the] right to do that."^[24] During a 2016 interview with James Franco, Wiseau referred to Greg Sestero as his "best friend".^[39] In a December 2017 interview with Howard Stern, he claimed to speak fluent French and said he is a Catholic.^[64]

• Room Full of Spoons, documentary about Wiseau