How Don Cheadle Achieved a Net Worth of $35 Million

Don Cheadle is an American actor who has been known to engage in a wide range of other activities as well. In recent times, a lot of people will recognize him as War Machine in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, that is far from being his sole role of note. As such, there is an estimate that Cheadle has a current net worth of $35 million.

How Did Don Cheadle Reach Their Current Net Worth?

For those who are curious, Cheadle was born in Kansas to a teacher and a clinical psychologist. However, his family didn’t settle in a single place but instead moved from city to city, which is why he went to school in Lincoln, NE as well as Denver, CO. In any case, Cheadle seems to have been very interested in the arts, as shown by his involvement in his school’s choir, jazz band, and theater department. As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that he went on to study Theater at the California Institute of the Arts.

By 1985, Cheadle had become eligible for his . This happened because he had shown up as a restaurant employee in the comedy Moving Violations. Eventually, Cheadle started showing up in other roles in other projects as well, with examples ranging from the police drama Hill Street Blues to the Vietnam War movie Hamburger Hill. Role by role, he built up his resume, thus bringing him closer and closer to his breakthrough role.

In 1995, Cheadle managed to land his breakthrough role in a neo-noir mystery thriller called Devil in a Blue Dress. Said movie was about an African-American veteran of the Second World War named Easy Rawlins who had been laid off from his job at an airplane manufacturer, thus prompting him to become a private investigator so that he can pay his bills. Cheadle didn’t play the main character Easy Rawlins but rather a supporting character named Mouse Alexander, which nonetheless managed to get him a Best Supporting Actor award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, another Best Supporting Actor award from the National Society of Film Critics, and a number of nominations for similar awards from similar organizations. As such, Cheadle’s Devil in a Blue Dress role did a fair amount to raise his profile, as shown by how he managed to get starring roles in a TV biopic called Rebound and then a disaster movie called Volcano soon afterwards.

Cheadle continued to appear in movies as well as other projects in the 2000s and beyond. For instance, he was in the second Rush Hour movie in 2001, meaning that he starred alongside Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Furthermore, he received Emmy nominations for roles in projects such as The Rat Pack and Things Behind the Sun. However, those roles were by no means the highlights of Cheadle’s career. In 2005, he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for playing Hotel Rwanda’s Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan hotel manager who managed to save 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees from a far-right Hutu militia in the Rwandan Genocide. Later, Cheadle was a co-producer for the Oscar-winning Crash in 2006, which also saw him receiving nominations for Best Supporting Actor from various organizations for his role as Detective Graham Waters in the movie. Having said that, not everything proved to be a success for him in that period of time, as shown by how his Adam Sandler collaboration Reign Over Me turned out to be a box office flop.

In any case, Cheadle took up the role of James Rhodes AKA War Machine in the second Iron Man movie in 2010 as the replacement for Terrence Howard. This happened because Howard refused to accept a pay cut for the follow-up after being the highest-paid star for the first movie, which apparently wasn’t helped by Howard’s hotheaded nature. Whatever the exact cause, Cheadle seems to have gotten along much better with Marvel, as shown by how he has been in a total of six movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Besides this, Cheadle has been in other notable projects of the 2010s as well. One example would be his starring role in House of Lies, which saw him receiving a Golden Globe for his performances. Another example would be his acting, directing, producing, and writing for the biopic Miles Ahead, which saw him receiving a fair amount of critical praise. On top of this, it is amusing to note that Cheadle has been guest-starring on the new DuckTales as well.

Further Considerations

It should be mentioned that Cheadle has been involved in a number of other projects as well. For example, he has co-authored a book. Likewise, he has organized a poker tournament. However, it seems unlikely that Cheadle has earned much if anything from these projects, seeing as how he got involved in them because of charitable purposes. In the first case, the book was meant to generate support for bringing an end to genocidal actions in the War in Darfur; while in the second case, the poker tournament was meant to raise money to help out the victims of the same conflict. Based on this, it should come as no surprise to learn that Cheadle is very involved in activism. Besides human rights issues in Africa, he has also made his positions very clear on issues that range from climate change to trans rights.

Regardless, it seems safe to say that Cheadle has managed to reach his current net worth because of his performances in a considerable number of movies, TV shows, and other projects over the course of his career. He has not been successful in everything that he has ever been involved with, but he has managed a huge number of them in three decades and counting. In the times to come, it seems reasonable to speculate that Cheadle’s net worth will continue to increase because of subsequent successes.

Of course, it is important to note that the $35 million is just an estimate of Cheadle’s finances based on incomplete information. As a result, it is far from being the sole figure that can be found out there. None of these numbers should be considered definitive. Instead, they are useful for giving a general idea of Cheadle’s finances.