Fans have stopped Dan Heder on the street to ask for an autograph, and he has told them they want his brother. According to his brother, they usually do not believe him.
That brother is Jon Heder, who played the title role in Napoleon Dynamite in 2004 and has been fielding questions about it ever since. The two are identical twins, born in Fort Collins, Colorado, on October 26, 1977. Both studied at Brigham Young University. Their careers then went in different directions, and the strange part is which twin ended up on the bigger movies.
Daniel Heder, as his screen credits list him, works in visual effects. He has around thirty credits since 2012, among them Captain America: Civil War, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Godzilla, Alita: Battle Angel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, where he was credited as a visualization lead. Jon spent those same years mostly doing voice work and smaller comedies.
Most of that work is previsualization, and previs does not survive into the finished film.
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What previsualization involves
Previs happens before anything gets shot. An artist takes a scene off the page and builds a rough animated version, so the director can watch it and make decisions early: where the camera goes, how long the chase runs, when the creature comes through the wall, whether the sequence is worth building at all. The rough cut becomes the plan the crew works from on the day.
Studios pay for it because changing a shot in rough animation is a far cheaper problem than changing it once a set exists and a unit is standing on it. The trade is that the previs gets replaced by real footage, and the artist finishes with nothing to point at.
The year both Heder twins worked on the same film
Sony Pictures Imageworks hired Dan in February 2005 as a character animator, and he stayed on the animation staff for about a year. One of the films he worked on was Monster House, the animated feature about a house that eats people.
Jon was in it too, voicing a pizza delivery guy called Skull.
Neither brother has ever given any sign this is a sore point. They appeared together as villains in the fourth installment of the web series Sockbaby, according to Jon Heder’s Wikipedia entry, and Dan turned up as himself on an episode of Punk’d in 2005.
Sixteen months when the movies kept disappearing
Universal signed a first-look deal in 2006 with Jon, Dan and their older brother Doug, under a company called Greasy Entertainment. According to his LinkedIn profile, Dan was an owner for two years and three months. Then the entry stops. Nobody has reported why it ended, and guessing would be pointless.
What happened next is on the record.
In September 2008 he took a five-month previs contract on Rango, the animated western Gore Verbinski was directing. In February 2009 he moved onto Bioshock, a Universal adaptation of the video game that Verbinski was also attached to. That April the studio shut it down over the budget and the R rating. Verbinski has said since that they were roughly eight weeks out from shooting when it happened.
In October, Dan started previs on Spider-Man 4, the fourth Sam Raimi film with Tobey Maguire attached. Sony scrapped it in January 2010 and rebooted the series instead.
Three jobs between September 2008 and January 2010. Rango reached cinemas in 2011 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and his filmography does not list it. The other two films were never made at all. Whatever he built for them exists now only as a line on a CV.
Nine years at the same job title
He joined The Third Floor in April 2010, a Los Angeles previs house set up in 2004 by artists who had worked together on Star Wars: Episode III at Lucasfilm. He stayed nine years and eight months, and his listed job title never changed across any of it. Previs artist, start to finish.
The screen credits told a different story. By 2018 he was a visualization lead on Infinity War, and again the year after on Endgame.
Selected credits
- 2012 Total Recall
- 2014 X-Men: Days of Future Past, Godzilla, Edge of Tomorrow, Guardians of the Galaxy
- 2015 San Andreas, The Last Witch Hunter
- 2016 Captain America: Civil War, The BFG
- 2017 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
- 2018 Avengers: Infinity War (visualization lead)
- 2019 Avengers: Endgame (visualization lead), Alita: Battle Angel, Spider-Man: Far From Home
- 2021 Eternals
- 2024 Red One
- 2025 Predator: Badlands
DNEG took him on as a visualization supervisor in November 2019, working out of Burbank, and he stayed five years. That stretch produced the only detailed public account of his work by anyone who has employed him.
Talking about Red One, production visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen said Dan and a colleague, Alex Cannon, ran the previs teams across DNEG and Torchlight, mapping out sequences that Sony Pictures Imageworks and Rodeo FX later built from. Chen put the planning stage at roughly four months. The finished film carried more than 1,950 visual effects shots.
What is not known about Dan Heder
He returned to The Third Floor in February 2025 and is credited on Predator: Badlands as a visualization artist rather than a lead or a supervisor. Whether that signals anything is unclear. Previs titles move around from film to film depending on how a studio staffs the show, and nobody has asked him about it.
Nobody has asked him about much of anything. No published interview with him has surfaced in two decades of work. His Instagram account is private, his LinkedIn carries no posts, and no verified net worth figure exists for him, whatever the sites publishing one suggest.
What is documented is thin and ordinary. He is 48. He lives in Burbank, and his Facebook profile lists his wife as Sarah Heder. He grew up in Salem, Oregon, one of six children born to a physician, James Heder, and his wife Helen. The rest sits in his screen credits, which run to about thirty films and describe none of it.
Twenty-two years after his brother became famous, the fullest public account of what Dan Heder actually does at work came from a colleague, in a trade interview, about a Christmas movie.
