Valerie Bertinelli's Son Wolfgang Van Halen's Stunning Transformation

Wolfgang Van Halen — nicknamed Wolfie — was born into a Hollywood family, which means he has grown up entirely in the public eye. Still, many people are unaware of just how far the star has come, having fully broken out from the shadow of his famous dad. Over time, Van Halen has transitioned from a musically gifted child prodigy to an awkward teen playing with his father's band to a Grammy-nominated frontman. He has shared a stage with Guns N' Roses and the Foo Fighters, released two critically acclaimed albums, and even performed at the Oscars in 2024. Not too shabby for a guy who was cyberbullied for joining Van Halen (the band) as a high schooler.

Wolfie is the son of legendary rock star Eddie Van Halen and "One Day at a Time" actor Valerie Bertinelli. Born on March 1991, his birth inspired the song "316," an instrumental track on Van Halen's album "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," released that same year. Not only has the younger Van Halen followed in his late father's musical footsteps, but he is keeping his memory alive in other ways — for example, fronting the family's guitar and gear business, EVH, and also honoring his dad at his 2024 wedding. Without further ado, here is a look at the stunning transformation of Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen's son, Wolfgang Van Halen.

Though his father was a musical genius, Wolfgang Van Halen was never pushed into music. The family instead waited to see if Van Halen showed an interest in playing music, which he ended up doing at a very early age. His mother told Spin that he started to show musical inclinations while still in diapers, and that Van Halen was "fiddling around on guitar" by age 6. But it was when he became interested in the drums at age 9 that the musician began to practice his craft regularly. In fact, the multi-instrumental Van Halen still considers himself "a drummer before anything else" (via Guitar Interactive), despite now being known more so for his bass and singing.

Once the spark was lit, things moved quickly. Van Halen's father showed him the basics using magazines on a dining table, provided him with the equipment, and then letting Wolfie take the reins. "He bought me a Roland V-Drums kit immediately. Later, on my 10th birthday he bought me an Everplay drum kit, like an actual acoustic drum kit. So that was the first thing and then basically from there, I just taught myself," Van Halen said in an interview with Music Radar. "I listened to Van Halen, Best Of: Volume One and Enema of the State by Blink-182. I listened to those two albums back and forth, trying to replicate everything I heard." The star also studied his uncle Alex, Van Halen's drummer, during the band's rehearsals.

Having mastered the drums, Wolfgang Van Halen set out to perfect his guitar skills next. He was 12 at the time, inspired by the song his father had written for him when he was born. Van Halen wanted to play the song at his school graduation, so he learned it — followed by many more. While many assume Van Halen must have been taught guitar by his father, he has been quick to strike down that theory in nearly every interview he has given. The musician is very proud of being self-taught, and he learned mostly from looking at guitar tabs for bands such as System of a Down. "I know Dad taught himself and I wanted to follow the same way," he told Spin. "It was important that I develop my own skills and my own sound. That's helped me or else you'd be listening to some s****y Van Halen cover band."

The more music Van Halen heard, the more he wanted to learn how to play all of the parts. Interestingly, the multi-instrumentalist has said that starting as a drummer helped him learn the guitar and bass in a unique way. "I think I have a very rhythmic approach to every other instrument because of my background as a drummer," he said in an interview with music blog Hyperlocrian. Van Halen is so skilled with multiple instruments that he singlehandedly recorded all of the music for both of his studio albums.

Long before the term "nepo baby" entered the public lexicon, Wolfgang Van Halen was receiving a ton of hate for the advantages garnered by his lineage. The critique began in 2007 after his father, Eddie, and uncle, Alex, reunited with bandmate David Lee Roth for a North American arena tour and enlisted Wolfgang to play bass instead of longtime band member Michael Anthony. Then at 15, he found himself the ire of many of the bands' middle-aged fans. "It was tough," he told Louder Sound. "I was there to support my dad, but I was aware that I'd become the biggest enemy of every forty-to-fifty-year-old man out there in the world. It was something I didn't know how to handle. That did a lot of damage to me."

Despite the vitriol thrown his way, Wolfgang remained with the band for the rest of their existence — which included two more tours (in 2012 and 2015, respectively) and the 2012 album "A Different Kind of Truth," the band's only record without Anthony on bass. The haters have somewhat quieted in the years following Wolfgang's solo efforts. However, Van Halen is not above firing back at the trolls when necessary. "People being rude and trying to say hateful things don't bother me," he said in the Louder Sound interview. "It's when people are stupid: 'Oh, you're milking the Van Halen name.' It's my f***ing name, you grape. Stupidity bothers me more than people trying to hurt me."

Wolfgang Van Halen doesn't really do training wheels. After cutting his teeth in Van Halen, he jumped right into another high-profile gig as a member of the band Tremonti. Created by and named after Mark Tremonti — a founding member of both Creed and Alter Bridge — the band came to fruition in 2011, and Van Halen joined not long after. "I had been friends with Mark for a handful of years; he needed a bass player and I happened to be in New Jersey at the time. So I went over one night at midnight and learnt the entire set, and the next day we were on tour," Van Halen divulged to RSJ Online. Wolfgang toured with Tremonti for a handful of years, balancing gigs around his touring schedule with Van Halen, which was in first position.

In addition to playing bass on tour, Van Halen also recorded two albums with the band: 2015's "Cauterize" and 2016's "Dust." A few major things happened for the budding frontman during this time period. First, he met music producer Michael "Elvis" Baskette, who would go on to produce both Mammoth WVH albums. Second, working with a band that did not bear his name allowed him to gain the necessary confidence to start writing his own music. At the time, Van Halen did not even know if he had the singing chops required for a solo album, and it was Baskette who assured him he did.

Wolfgang Van Halen began working on his debut solo album around the time of his first tour with Tremonti, but he was long gone from that band by the time his album actually came together. In total, he spent a whopping eight years working on the project — his enthusiasm was delayed by everything from touring commitments to his father's sickness. Van Halen has also discussed having to find his way, both musically and personally, during the making of the album. "I didn't know who I was before it started. I didn't know what it was going to be," he told Rolling Stone. "I just knew I had this dream of pulling a Dave Grohl and doing an album all on my own — you know, recording everything, writing everything. And I wasn't sure if I could do it."

One thing that did not take much time was naming his one-man band Mammoth WVH since Wolfgang had long planned to name a band after one of Van Halen's early monikers. Mammoth WVH's self-titled album was released in June 2021, spurring two big hits on the rock charts. "Releasing this music was such a huge thing for me in so many different ways," Van Halen wrote on X (formerly twitter) a year later. "It was the culmination of years of work, trial and error, loss, self-doubt, and anxiety. It was a long road that led me to figuring out who I was as my own person and artist."

Wolfgang Van Halen has been very open about his anxiety and depression, as well as the self-doubt that arose after years of online attacks. "I've been raised for half my life, with everyone — outside of my inner circle of people who are kind to me, and family and friends — vehemently hating me and trying to convince me that I'm not good enough. And I won't lie. That, at a young age, really gets in your head," he said to Rolling Stone. Wolfgang had these critiques in his mind when he was working on his first album and also when he went out on stage representing Mammoth WVH for the first time in July 2021.

Van Halen's first Mammoth WVH show was quite small — only 350 people fit in the Lawrence, Kansas, club where the band made their debut — but the musician nearly chickened out. "I was sitting there in the little dressing room, going: 'I don't know if I can do this,'" he told Louder Sound. "I've found that the time that I'm most unable to control my anxiety is the first time I'm doing something. And that was a really, really, really big first — the first Mammoth show, the first time I was the frontman, the first time having to be the thing that everybody was looking at." Van Halen jumped right into the deep end after two small shows, signing on as the opening act for Guns N' Roses' summer 2021 tour.

As is customary in the music business, Mammoth WVH released their debut single well before their album's spring 2021 release. The song "Distance" was a deeply personal one for Van Halen, as it is directed at his beloved father. The musician started writing the song before his dad's death — Eddie Van Halen was sick for years before his October 2020 death by stroke, which a death certificate noted was connected to the underlying issues of pneumonia, lung cancer, and myelodysplastic syndrome — but only finished it following the loss. "I was in such a dark space. The uncertainty, the emotional weight of everything I was experiencing. That's when I really started understanding how healing music can be," Van Halen said to Louder Sound.

The song came out only one month after Eddie's death, and Van Halen chose to utilize home video footage from his childhood for the music video. "Distance" debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's "Hot Hard Rock Songs" and "Hard Rock Digital Song Sales" charts, and also ranked high on two other Billboard lists. The song was also nominated for "Best Rock Song" at the 2022 Grammy Awards, which Van Halen attended with his now-wife and his mother, Valerie Bertinelli. Though he lost out to the Foo Fighters, Van Halen expressed gratitude and was even able to find a silver lining. "Pop didn't win the first time he was nominated too, so it looks like I'm following in his footsteps quite nicely," he tweeted (via People).

Even though he was a part of Van Halen for over a decade, Wolfgang Van Halen has made it a point to distance himself from the band's music since striking out on his own. "You hear my name and you're like: 'I know what he's about.' But that's not what I'm about," he said to Louder Sound. "Sure, that stuff is in my blood, but it's like: 'What do I have to offer of my own merit as a songwriter and a musician?'" While the biggest reason he won't play Van Halen at Mammoth shows is so that he can distinguish himself as an artist, Wolfgang has also said it is simply too emotionally difficult for him to play his late father's music without him.

Wolfgang made a huge exception to his rule when he played Van Halen songs at two September 2022 tribute concerts for deceased Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. At the first concert — a show for 90,000 fans at London's Wembley Stadium — the musician played both "Hot for Teacher" and "On Fire." At the second, he played "Panama," a song he previously swore he would never cover but agreed to do to honor his dad. "If I was going to do it, I was going to do it right," he exclaimed to Spin. "It wasn't going to be something I was going to do a bunch of times. It was just this once."

While he had originally hoped to do some writing on tour, Van Halen found himself spending any downtime he had catching up on sleep instead. But then the world shut down, it prompted a bout of creativity. "I wrote a bunch of ideas during quarantine. And then, you know, random things here and there," he stated to Rolling Stone. And every bit of time off I've had from touring, I started making demos just actually on this computer right here. And so I've just accumulated a bunch of ideas that I'm really excited to start working on." In the same article, Van Halen discussed wanting to explore different vibes on his second album, like his first piano ballad, for example.

Mammoth WVH's second album, "Mammoth II," was released through BMG — with whom the band signed a contract that March — in August 2023. Like the first album, it debuted at number one on Billboard's list of Top Hard Rock Albums (and hit number 28 on the mainstream Billboard 200). The first single, "Another Celebration at the End of the World," was a top 10 hit on two different Billboard rock charts, and the follow-up, "I'm Alright," did well too. Van Halen did all of the recording work by himself once again, providing the vocals, guitars, bass, drums, percussion, and piano.

When Dave Grohl first asked Wolfgang Van Halen to perform his dad's hits at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts, he said no. It was only after consulting with those around him that Van Halen agreed, as he was convinced it could be a tribute to his father as well. When he speaks of the tribute or of his dad in general, Van Halen's grief is palpable. It is evident that his father was his hero and that his loss has left a void in his son's life. Because of this, Wolfgang's now-wife made it a point to ensure that Eddie would be on everyone's mind the day she married into the Van Halen family. "One of the things that I really wanted was a way to bring Wolf's dad into it," Andraia Van Halen told People. "We'll be having an empty chair that would've been his at the ceremony."

The couple, who married in October 2023 on the 8th anniversary of their first date, integrated Eddie in other ways as well. Since the wedding was held in their living room, they cleared all of the bookshelves and filled them with photos of people who had passed and could not make it. Andraia also made "little memory charms with a picture of Wolfie and his dad on it" for each person in the wedding party. Finally, the groom and his mother walked down the aisle to the song "316," the instrumental track Eddie named for his son.

When one thinks of hard rockers, the Academy Awards is not typically an adjacent thought. Or at least it wasn't before the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024. That is when Ryan Gosling took to the stage to perform "I'm Just Ken," alongside some co-stars, a gaggle of dancers, and a few hard rockers. There was Slash, the renowned Guns N' Roses guitarist who had "Barbie" director Greta Gerwig losing her mind in the audience, and there was also Wolfgang Van Halen, who got slightly overshadowed by the aforementioned rock legend. But on second watch, Van Halen is very much a presence on that stage if you look beyond Slash's giant top hat.

"It was very crazy but an exciting thing to be a part of. That is not my normal place to hang around in or operate from, so I felt a little like a fish out of water," Van Halen joked to The Morning Call. Producers did not just bring the duo in for the "I'm Just Ken" performance, either. Both Slash and Van Halen were involved in recording the song — which lost out on the "Best Song" Oscar to another from the same movie — as was Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese and Imperial Drag keyboardist Roger Manning. "To have a small part in something like that was a really cool thing. I loved playing on it and being a part of the movie," Van Halen said in that same article.