New Year, new you, new chance for a silly excuse to write about one filmmaker’s body of work. And after last year’s Summer Baycation, I’m feeling a little ambitious. Fifteen films over a long summer was easy. This year, the goal is simple: To examine the acting and directing career of one Jon Favreau.
When I landed on the idea of “Twenty 20-Fav”, I was simply looking for a punchy title. But once I was done amusing myself, I started to really think about it. Here’s a guy who worked his way into the Hollywood A-list organically, playing bit parts in movies and TV shows for a few years before deciding to take the reins and be the kind of storyteller he wanted to be. Quickly establishing himself as a reliable comic performer, and later as a clever screenwriter and director, Favreau has improbably become one of the architects of modern blockbuster filmmaking. He not only put Marvel Studios on the map with the first two Iron Man films, he also helped bring Star Wars into the streaming age with The Mandalorian.
Favreau’s path to becoming part of the Disney Brain Trust began in Flushing, Queens. A college dropout, Favreau made his way to Chicago to be a part of the Second City improv troupe. At the time, he assumed the path to stardom was through Second City, moving up to Saturday Night Live before finally making the jump to making movies; the Dan Aykroyd/Bill Murray trajectory. He worked Second City around the same time as Mike Myers and Chris Farley, two performers whose own rise to stardom apparently hogged the limelight, as he says he spent most of his time there washing dishes.
The SNL route becoming more and more of a pipe dream, Favreau began auditioning for film and TV gigs on his own. After appearing in four films, Favreau landed his first TV appearance as Eric the Clown in a now-iconic scene from Seinfeld1.
Favreau soon found himself leapfrogging over the assumed SNL path to stardom, appearing in a handful of films and TV shows in the early 90s, playing a taxi driver in the movie Folks!, and appearing as an extra in Danny DeVito’s biopic of Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa. And it wouldn’t be long before his first real film role, which we’ll talk about next time.
Obviously, we won’t be looking at every little film in Jon Favreau’s IMDb filmography. The year is only so long, so I’ve selected roughly 30 films to cover in 2025. I would love to use this as an excuse to write up Batman Forever, for example, but I won’t, because Favreau is only in it for about ten seconds. Regardless, we’ll chart Favreau’s ascent as a comic actor, take a look at his handful of leading roles, explore his work as a writer and later a director, and even map out his various associations with other actors and producers. (Two actors, in particular, are going to be regular fixtures in this column).
More than anything, though, this project is simply an excuse to branch out a bit and write about movies I otherwise would probably never touch. And at the tail end of all this, there’s a whole host of Marvel and Star Wars media to talk about. So before we can get to all the silly fun stuff, we have a lot of grueling, hard work to do that will likely never pay off. Which, in a weird way, sets up our first entry kinda perfectly.
NEXT TIME: He’s so little!
- If anyone knows who created the painting at the top of this page, please contact me so I can properly credit this mad genius. I used every method at my disposal and could not come up with the person’s name. So whoever you are: Bless you. ↩︎
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