Best Known As: The guy who played Napoleon Dynamite
Jon Heder starred as the title character of the low-budget box office hit Napoleon Dynamite (2004). Heder grew up in Salem, Oregon and attended Brigham Young University in Utah. While at BYU he studied animation and began appearing in student-produced short films. One of these films, a comedy called Peluca, was expanded to the feature length film Napoleon Dynamite and earned a screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Its surprising success at the festival led to national distribution, and by the end of 2004 Heder's portrayal of the hapless Napoleon was being imitated across the United States and the film had grossed more than a hundred times what it cost to make. Heder's career as an actor took off. He next appeared in the Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy Just Like Heaven (2005, with Mark Ruffalo), and landed roles in other comedies including the animated feature Monster House (2006, with Maggie Gyllenhaal) and the ice-skating farce Blades of Glory (2007, with Will Ferrell).
Career Highlights: Monster House, Surf's Up, Blades of Glory
First Major Screen Credit: Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Biography
American actor Jon Heder was studying 3-D animation at Brigham Young University when he met Jared Hess, the director who would make his a familiar face. Hess cast Heder in his short film Peluca, and then in his full-length feature film Napoleon Dynamite. At 27, Heder had never appeared in a movie before, but the surprise success of the film gave him instant notoriety. Napoleon Dynamite was a quirky, low-budget comedy about a nerdy high-schooler in an outdated small town in rural Idaho. Heder's dead-on characterization struck a chord with audiences and the small independent film became a huge hit, raking in over 44 million dollars and winning the MTV Movie Award for Best Movie. Heder personally took home two awards from the ceremony himself, one for Breakthrough Male Performance, and one for Best Musical Performance, for his election dance.
Of those three films, The Benchwarmers hit audiences first, in spring 2006. Described by one prominent critic as Revenge of the Nerds with an increased fart quotient and added projectile vomiting, this dumb-dumb frat comedy cast Heder, Spade and Schneider as a trio of losers who form a baseball team to thwart a bunch of elementary-school bullies; Heder played a booger-eating dork with an unhealthy degree of maternal attachment. The press trashed the film, and unsurprisingly, it scored at the box office, grossing in excess of 65 million dollars. Heder scored better on all fronts by voicing Reginald "Skull" Skulinski in the Steven Spielberg-produced, CG-animated family film Monster House, a spooky and funny romp about a home that begins devouring trick-or-treaters, and the three youngsters who set out to stop it.
The November 2006 release School for Scoundrels returned Heder to live-action material. In that picture (a remake of the 1960 British comedy classic by director Robert Hamer), Heder plays yet another variation on his Napoleon Dynamite character -- this one as Roger, a socially maladroit, backward meter reader who enrolls in a confidence-building course taught by Machiavellian teacher Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton), to gain the confidence to sway the girl of his dreams -- and ends up faced with the prof's nasty scheme to win the lass for himself. Unfortunately, the film (helmed by Old School director Todd Phillips) not only received a critical drubbing, but only reeled in about 21 million dollars at the box office.
As 2007 dawned, Heder struck gold by starring opposite Will Ferrell in the SNL funnyman's latest buddy comedy, Blades of Glory. The two portrayed figure skaters whose bitter rivalry leads to a much-publicized brawl at the Olympics, stripping them of their medals; the men subsequently decide to reattain their old glory by re-entering the Olympic competition as a figure-skating pair. In a most unusual turn of events, the picture not only received many outstanding reviews in the press, but became the top box-office grosser of its weekend. Later that year, Heder voiced a surfing penguin (Chicken Joe) in the CG-animated family comedy Surf's Up and moved into slightly deeper and more challenging onscreen material with the Warner Independent comedy drama Mama's Boy. In that film, directed by neophyte Tim Hamilton, Heder played a slacker who must reinvestigate his goals and priorities when his single mother (Diane Keaton) takes a self-help guru (Jeff Daniels) as her new beau. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide
Heder was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, and is one of six children of family practice physician Dr. James Heder and his wife Helen. He has an identical twin brother named Dan. He also has an older sister and brother, Rachel and Doug, and two younger brothers, Adam and Matt. Heder graduated from South Salem High School in Salem, Oregon in 1996. He is a former member of the swim team at South Salem High. In addition, he was a staff member of the Drama Association, DRAMA, in 1995. In the issue, there is a piece of art by Jon Heder that resembles a liger.
A 2002 alumnus of Brigham Young University, Heder worked on the short CGI animated film "Pet Shop" which earned a non-traditional animation student Emmy in 2005. After his movie career took off, he did not return to complete the work he started on the short, although his name does appear in the credits. Also, while attending BYU he befriended Jared Hess and starred in his short film Peluca, which was later expanded into Napoleon Dynamite. "Peluca" received rave reviews on the BYU campus after showing at a few college and local film festivals and competitions.
Napoleon Dynamite, filmed in Preston, Idaho, earned more revenue than almost any other Sundance movie.[citation needed] In June 2005, Heder received the MTV Movie Award for Best Musical Performance and Breakthrough Male Performance for the role. On October 8, 2005, he hosted Saturday Night Live with musical guest Ashlee Simpson. After his success with Napoleon Dynamite, for which he was paid only $1,000, Heder and his film co-star Efren Ramirez filmed a series of commercials to promote the 2005 UtahState Fair. They appear as their characters from Napoleon Dynamite; in at least one commercial, they are shown with the FFA medals that they won in the context of the movie.
He appeared in the film The Sasquatch Gang. He had a supporting role as a clerk in a new age bookstore in the romantic comedyJust Like Heaven. He also starred alongside Rob Schneider and David Spade as part of the trio in producer Adam Sandler's The Benchwarmers (2006), a comedy about three grown men making up for lost chances by creating their own Little Leaguebaseball team. He was the voice of the character Skull in the animated film Monster House, and starred in the comedy School for Scoundrels, opposite Billy Bob Thornton and Jacinda Barrett. With the exception of the Academy Award-nominee Monster House, Heder's post-Dynamite movies were widely panned[citation needed] and he risked becoming a one-hit wonder until he co-starred in 2007 with Will Ferrell in the well-received Blades of Glory (2007). Like many of Heder's films, Blades of Glory is an absurd, slapstick caricature, in this case revolving around male figure skaters who must team up in a pairs competition.
Heder's second turn at voice acting came in 2007 when he voiced the character of Chicken Joe, a surfing chicken, in the animated film Surf's Up. His first foray into web television was in the 2008 web series Woke Up Dead starring and produced by Heder.[3]Woke Up Dead is a web-based, live-action sci-fi comedy thriller about Drex, a twenty-something USC student who wakes up underwater in the bathtub one morning and suspects that he might be dead.
Jon and his twin brother Dan star together as villains in the fourth installment of the popular internet martial arts comedy series Sockbaby.
Personal life
Heder lives with his wife Kirsten Heder in Los Angeles, California. The two have been married since 2002. The couple had a girl, Evan Jane Heder, on April 6, 2007.[4]
Jon and Dan
Jon stated during an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman that he and his identical twin, Dan Heder, think alike and, as children, would often finish each other's sentences (a common occurrence with identical twins). When Letterman asked him whether being an identical twin is a good experience, Dan replied that it is mostly good, but that as children "we caused a lot trouble by pretending to be the other, the memories still give me a good chuckle."
