What is Fred Armisen’s Net Worth, Career, Biography, Facts, Age, Life Story

Fred Armisen is an American comedian, actor, musician, writer, and producer who has a net worth of $8 million. Armisen is best known for his work as a cast member of the NBC sketch comedy show “Saturday Night Live” (2002–2013) and the IFC series “Portlandia” (2011–2018). He co-created “Portlandia” as well as IFC’s “Documentary Now!” (2015–present) and HBO’s “Los Espookys” (2019–present), and he has served as a writer and executive producer on all three shows.

Fred has more than 160 acting credits to his name, including the films “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (2004), “The Rocker” (2008), and “Staten Island Summer” (2015) and the TV series “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” (2013–2018), “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (2016–2020), “Forever” (2018), and “Moonbase 8” (2020–present). Armisen has lent his voice to numerous film and television projects, such as “The Smurfs” (2011), “The Lego Ninjago Movie” (2017), “Crank Yankers” (2003–2007), “The Looney Tunes Show” (2011–2014), “Big Mouth” (2017–present), and “Final Space” (2018–present).

Fred founded the website ThunderAnt.com, which features comedy sketches created with his “Portlandia” co-creator/co-star Carrie Brownstein, and he became the bandleader for The 8G Band, the house band for “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” in 2014. Armisen released several albums with the Chicago-based punk band Trenchmouth, including “Inside the Future” (1993) and “Volumes, Amplifiers, Equalizers” (1995), and he played background drums for Blue Man Group in the ’90s. In 2018, Fred released the album “Standup for Drummers,” which earned him a Grammy nomination, and in 2015, “Smithsonian” magazine honored him with the American Ingenuity Award for Performing Arts.

Early Life

Fred Armisen was born Fereydun Robert Armisen on December 4, 1966, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. When Fred was a baby, his family moved to New York, and they later lived in Brazil. His mother, Hildegardt Mirabal Level (a schoolteacher), was born in Venezuela, and his father, Fereydun Herbert Armisen (an IBM employee), was born in Germany. Armisen grew up in Valley Stream, New York, where future “Saturday Night Live” star Jim Breuer was one of his high school classmates. Fred attended Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, but he dropped out to pursue a career as a rock drummer.

Career

Armisen played drums in a band with his high school friends in 1984, and he moved to Chicago in 1988 to join the band Trenchmouth. The band broke up in 1996, and Fred later played drums on tracks by Wandering Lucy, Les Savy Fav, and Matthew Sweet. Armisen made his acting debut in the 1998 short film “Guide to Music and South by Southwest,” which he also wrote and directed, and in 2002, he joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” During his 11 years on the show, he impersonated Barack Obama and Prince and was known for characters such as Fericito, Nooni Schoener, and Ian Rubbish. Fred has made numerous appearances on “SNL” since he left, and he hosted the show in May 2016. While starring on “SNL,” he appeared in several films, including “Melvin Goes to Dinner” (2003), “Eurotrip” (2004), “Deck the Halls” (2006), “Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny” (2006), “Baby Mama” (2008), “Confessions of a Shopaholic” (2009), “Cop Out” (2010) and “Easy A” (2010).

Armisen guest-starred on “30 Rock” (2007; 2012), “The Sarah Silverman Program” (2008), “Parks and Recreation” (2009), “Up All Night” (2012), and “Kroll Show” (2013), and from 2011 to 2018, he starred on the sketch comedy series “Portlandia,” which aired 77 episodes over eight seasons. In 2014, Fred appeared in the documentary ” Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-90),” guest-starred on “Broad City,” “House of Lies,” and “Modern Family,” and voiced Gustavo Calderon on six episodes of “Archer.” In 2015, he began writing, producing, and starring on the mockumentary series “Documentary Now!” with his former “SNL” castmates Seth Meyers and Bill Hader. That year he also hosted the 30th Independent Spirit Awards and appeared in the HBO movie “7 Days in Hell,” the feature films “Addicted to Fresno” and “Staten Island Summer,” and the documentary “The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead.”

From 2016 to 2020, Armisen portrayed suspected murderer Robert Durst on five episodes of Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” and in 2017, he began voicing Elliot Birch on another Netflix series, “Big Mouth.” In 2018, Fred co-starred with “SNL” alum Maya Rudolph on the Amazon Prime Video series “Forever,” and in 2019, he began starring on, writing, and producing the primarily Spanish-language HBO series “Los Espookys.” In 2020, Armisen joined the cast of the Showtime series “Moonbase 8,” starring as Dr. Michael “Skip” Henai alongside John C. Reilly and Tim Heidecker; Fred is also  a writer and producer on the show. In recent years, he has appeared in the films “The Little Hours” (2017), “Battle of the Sexes” (2017), “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot” (2019), and “All Together Now” (2020) and the television series “The Last Man on Earth” (2017–2018), “Superstore” (2019), “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (2020), “Mapleworth Murders” (2020), and “Schmigadoon!” (2021).

Personal Life

Fred married singer-songwriter Sally Timms in 1998, and after they divorced in 2004, he began a relationship with actress Elisabeth Moss. They met when Moss appeared in an October 2008 episode of “Saturday Night Live” hosted by her “Mad Men” co-star Jon Hamm, and they became engaged three months later. Armisen and Moss married on October 25, 2009, and Elisabeth filed for divorce in September 2010. The divorce was finalized in May 2011, and Fred began dating actress Natasha Lyonne in 2014. Lyonne directed Armisen in the 2017 short film “Cabiria, Charity, Chastity,” and she has guest-starred on “Documentary Now!” and “Portlandia.” Fred enjoys playing the video game “Red Dead Redemption,” and after he stated that he was “very good” at the game on “Larry King Now,” Rockstar Games cast him in “Red Dead Redemption 2.”

Awards and Nominations

Armisen has been nominated for 14 Primetime Emmys: Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series (2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (2014), and Outstanding Variety Sketch Series (2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018) for “Portlandia,” Outstanding Variety Sketch Series (2016, 2017, and 2019) for Documentary Now!,” Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special (2015) for “Saturday Night Live: 40th Anniversary Special,” and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series (2016) for “Saturday Night Live.”  Fred earned a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album for “Standup for Drummers” in 2019, and he won a Peabody Award for “Portlandia” in 2011. He has received seven Writers Guild of America nominations, winning Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) – Series for “Portlandia” in 2013 and Comedy/Variety Sketch Series for “Saturday Night Live” in 2017.

Armisen and his “The Looney Tunes Show” co-stars were nominated for three “Behind the Voice Actors Awards,” Best Vocal Ensemble in a Television Series in 2012 and Best Vocal Ensemble in a Television Series – Comedy/Musical in 2013 and 2014. “Portlandia” earned Fred an Online Film & Television Association Award nomination for Best Male Performance in a Fiction Program in 2015 and Best Male Performance in a Variety Program in 2018, and he received a Webby Award nomination for Video – Best Individual Performance for “The Clash: The Last Gang in Town” in 2014.

Real Estate

In January 2014, Armisen paid $763,000 for a 1,456 square foot home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, and he put the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house on the market for $949,000 in March 2016. The following month, he purchased a 3,491 square foot home in nearby Los Feliz for approximately $2.03 million.