Greg Sestero Books in Order

If you only read one Greg Sestero book: The Disaster Artist
If you want the cult-movie backstory: The Disaster Artist
If you like behind-the-scenes Hollywood memoirs: The Disaster Artist

Greg Sestero was born in Walnut Creek, California, in 1978, and grew up in Danville in a French-American family. Movies got to him early. After seeing Home Alone, he wrote his own sequel at 12 and mailed it off. John Hughes sent back a letter, and that small reply stuck with him.

As a teenager, Sestero started modeling and spent time working in Milan and Paris. It might have become a full career, but acting was the real plan. He trained at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, signed with agent Iris Burton, and headed for Los Angeles looking for screen work.

Hollywood did not open its doors all at once. He picked up small parts in projects like Nash Bridges, Gattaca, Patch Adams, and Days of Our Lives. He also landed a lead in Retro Puppet Master. It was working-actor life, long on auditions and short on certainty.

Then Tommy Wiseau walked into an acting class.

Sestero met Wiseau in San Francisco when he was 19, and the friendship changed the shape of his career. Wiseau was odd, secretive, and impossible to ignore. Sestero was drawn to the sheer confidence of a man who seemed completely unmoved by embarrassment, which later became the heart of both The Room and The Disaster Artist.

When Wiseau decided to make The Room, Sestero ended up playing Mark, a role he has often said he never really wanted. The 2003 film crashed on release, then slowly found an audience at midnight screenings and quote-along events. What could have been a career dead end turned into the thing people knew him for.

Most people would have run from that story.

Sestero wrote The Disaster Artist, with Tom Bissell, as a way to tell what actually happened behind the scenes and to make sense of a friendship that was funny, frustrating, and surprisingly durable. Published in 2013, the memoir became a hit far beyond cult-movie circles. Readers came for the chaos around The Room, but many stayed for the story of two young men chasing movie dreams in Los Angeles from very different starting points.

The book also opened a new lane for him. It was adapted into the 2017 film The Disaster Artist, with Dave Franco playing Sestero and James Franco playing Wiseau. Around the same period, Sestero kept acting and writing, including the dark, odd-couple thriller Best F(r)iends, which he wrote for himself and Wiseau, and later the horror film Miracle Valley, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. Across those projects, you can see what draws him in: outsider ambition, uneasy friendships, Hollywood hope, and the thin line between sincerity and disaster.

These days, Sestero still works across acting, writing, and directing, and he has continued to appear at screenings tied to The Room. That makes sense. His career has never followed a straight line, and he seems to know it. What readers tend to like about him, on the page as much as on screen, is that he does not smooth the weird parts out. He leaves the awkward pauses, the bad decisions, the dreamer logic, and the human loyalty in place. In his world, the mess is the story.