From Queens dropout to the director who launched Marvel's film universe
Jon Favreau quit college a few credits short, did improv in Chicago and played a clown on Seinfeld. Twelve years after his first screen role, he directed Iron Man, the 2008 hit that set the Marvel Cinematic Universe rolling and later earned a place in the National Film Registry.
Favreau was born in Flushing, Queens, on October 19, 1966, the only child of two teachers. His mother, Madeleine, died of leukemia in 1979; she was Ashkenazi Jewish and his father Charles is a Catholic of Italian and French-Canadian descent. After The Bronx High School of Science he spent 1984 to 1987 at Queens College, earning the nickname Johnny Hack for his Hacky Sack skills, tried a spell at Bear Stearns, and left for good in 1988, heading to Chicago.
His first film part came there, as the tutor D-Bob in Rudy (1993), where he met Vince Vaughn. The two broke through together in Swingers (1996), which Favreau also wrote, casting himself as the heartbroken Mike Peters opposite Vaughn's Trent Walker. Television kept him busy too: he turned up as a millionaire boyfriend of Monica Geller on Friends in 1997 and played himself on The Sopranos. His first film as director was Made in 2001, again with Vaughn.
Commercial success behind the camera arrived with Elf in 2003, starring Will Ferrell. Signed in April 2006 to direct Iron Man, he released it on May 2, 2008 to huge acclaim, and also played the bodyguard Happy Hogan, a role he carried through later Avengers and Spider-Man films. In 2022 the Library of Congress added Iron Man to the National Film Registry, one of only three superhero pictures honoured that way.
He then shifted between scales. Chef (2014), which he wrote, directed and starred in, followed a cook who quits a Los Angeles restaurant to run a food truck with his son. Disney hired him for a live-action The Jungle Book in 2016 and a computer-animated The Lion King in 2019, his first musical, with Donald Glover as Simba. With Dave Filoni he created The Mandalorian for Disney+, and he has collected an Emmy Award and two Saturn Awards.
Source: Jon Favreau
