Celebrities: They're just like us. Or so our guilty-pleasure nail-salon reading may lead us to believe. But if their Instagrams have taught us anything, it's that celebs really aren't just like us. After all, when was the last time an entire team of professionals worked all day to get you glammed up and into a dress that costs more than your rent? Yeah, me neither. But they are like us in one way: They, too, have to pay the bills. These days, movie roles and endorsement deals may make that job easier. But for many stars, there was a time when making rent wasn't so simple. Before they were famous, these folks were paying their dues serving up fries, scooping ice cream, and cleaning breast pumps (yes, really). Click through for some of the most surprising first jobs of our favorite stars.
Kerry Washington
Washington worked as a substitute teacher in New York City when she was first starting out. But after her rolein Save The Last Dance, she could only teach elementary school students, since the older kids would recognize her.
Amy Poehler
Poehler reminisced about her summer job scooping ice cream in an essay for the New Yorker. She described the work as "hard and physical," with lots of "stacking, wiping, scooping, and lifting." But working there did give her a taste of the limelight: She would have to sing for the entire restaurant for children's birthdays.
Poehler had been planning on becoming a teacher, but her experience serenading birthday boys and girls taught her something. "I was reminded of things I already secretly knew about myself. I wasn’t shy, I liked to be looked at, and making people laugh released a certain kind of hot lava into my body that made me feel like a queen."
Lena Dunham
In Not That Kind Of Girl, Dunham reminisced about her first job out of college: selling overpriced children's clothes with some friends at a Manhattan boutique. The job paid $100 a day and included lunch, but most importantly, the time spent folding luxury baby leggings was boring enough that it inspired her to shoot the web series, Delusional Downtown Divas, which helped launch her career.
Gwen Stefani
Like Amy Poheler, Stefani also worked at an ice cream shop as a teen. There, she learned the perils of Dairy Queen firsthand. "When I started there, I fit in my outfit. When I ended there, I did not fit in my outfit."
Andrew Garfield
When Garfield was growing up in England, his parents paid him to clean up their backyard for five pounds a day when he was just six.
"I hated it. It was just so miserable," he told the Wall Street Journal. He did learn a lesson, though.“Sometimes you’ve got to do stuff you don’t want to do."
Mindy Kaling
While The Officewas Kaling's first job on a comedy series, it wasn't her first time working for a TV show. Back when she was living in a railroad apartment in Astoria, she worked as a production assistant on the show Crossing Over with John Edward.
Does she believe the host could really talk to the dead?Kaling told The A.V. Clubshe didn't even feel like Edwards really believed it. Though the audience clearly did, and Kaling said their excitement could make the job "[i]n some ways...very uplifting."
Kristen Wiig
Wiig held down a number of part-time gigs while training with the Groundlings improv group her first year in L.A. The worst, as she told Vogue, was answering phones for a law firm — a job that lasted all of a day. "This is going to make me sound so stupid, but the phone system was so confusing, I literally couldn’t figure it out."
Gina Rodrigeuz
Before playing a pregnant virgin on the hit series Jane The Virgin, Rodriguez was getting lots of practice with babies — as a nanny who specialized in twins. As she told Jimmy Kimmel, "If you take care of two babies...the nannies are going home paid."
James Franco
When Franco dropped out of college to pursue acting, his parents told him he'd have to support himself. So he quickly got a job at McDonald's, where he got to practice his accents while manning the drive-thru late at night.
After only three months, he booked a Pizza Hut commercial and was able to quit and support himself with acting full-time, but he still looks back on his time at McDonald's fondly. He penned an essay for the Washington Post on his experience and wrote that "McDonald's was there for me when no one else was."
Rashida Jones
Jones might have a famous dad (Quincy Jones), but that doesn't mean she didn't have to pay her dues. While auditioning, Jones also worked as a writer's assistant for an MTV pilot about a hip-hop club called World Famous. Shealso interned at Marie Claire, an experience she told Interview was "hardcore.""You have to really want it and really love it," she explained. "I love fashion, but maybe I love it peripherally."
Adam Levine
Before there was Maroon 5, and long before there was The Voice, Levine paid the bills as a waiter at Johnny Rocket's.
Abbi Jacobson & Ilana Glazer
Fans of Broad City might be able to guess some of the pre-fame jobs of this comedy duo. Jacobson's job at an Equinox Gym provided some of the inspiration for her alter ego's thankless gig at Soulstice, and both women worked at a company that sold discounted beauty services — which sounds pretty similar to Glazer's job at Deals Deals Deals on the show.
Amy Adams
Adams recalls her days of working at Hooters fondly. When E! asked her about it on the red carpet, she only had good things to say. "They were great! It was a great way to earn money for a car."
Chris Hemsworth
When asked byCollider about his worst job, Hemsworth didn't hesitate: cleaning breast pumps. Using a toothbrush and a spray bottle, the actor had to scrub milk off of the pumps, which were available for rent from a pharmacy where he worked.
Nicki Minaj
Back when she was just an aspiring rapper from Queens, Minaj did a number of odd jobs, including a stint at Red Lobster. She was fired after flipping the bird at a couple who had taken her pen. When GQ asked her if the pen was special, she replied, "No. It was the principle."
Constance Wu
These days, Wu is receiving plenty of praise for her hilarious portrayal of Jessica Huang on Fresh Off The Boat. But, as she told The A.V. Club, she still fears having to return to her old job: "I’m constantly paranoid that I’ll be unemployed for the rest of my life…and have to go back to folding shirts at the Gap,"
Bradley Cooper
In high school, Cooper worked at the Philadelphia Daily News, the paper reported in an 2009 interview with the actor. Among his articles was a piece titled "When Best Friends Cross The Line," an editorial about his best friend that Cooper says made him sound like a "lovesick puppy" and resulted in some not-so-good-natured teasing from his classmates. "I went to a lacrosse game the day it came out, and people were booing me," he later recalled.
Emilia Clarke
When the Mother of Dragons was a student at NYU, she worked as a licensed real estate agent, Marie Claire revealed. A far cry from the Iron Throne!
Sam Smith
Smith's career has seen a meteoric rise over the past few years, but to stay humble he reminds himself of his pre-fame job: scrubbing toilets in a bar. As he told Melissa Block in an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, "I remind myself of that every day, at the moment, because I don't want to take anything for granted."
Retta
Before "Treat yo' self" was a cultural touchstone, Retta worked in a lab at GlaxoSmithKline after graduating pre-med from Duke. Thankfully, she started going to comedy clubs after work and realized her true calling: to make us laugh.
Jennifer Hudson
Before auditioning for American Idol, Hudson was performing on a Disney Cruise in musical adaptations of Hercules and The Lion King. She told W magazine that the job not only gave her the courage to go out for Idol ; the acting experience helped her snag the part of Effie in Dreamgirls.
Chris Pratt
At only 19, Chris Pratt was quickly climbing the ladder at a coupon company that paid employees on commission. He did so well that, after a while, he was able to open his own office.
Sadly, as Pratt remembered on The Graham Norton Show, not all of his new employees were as motivated as he was. Rather than go-getting teens, he found himself managing "the bottom of the unemployment bucket" who would sometimes even rob the people they were supposed to be selling to.
Emma Stone
Stone is already a bona fide Hollywood veteran at 27 — but that doesn't mean her early years were without some less-than-dignified gigs. While taking high school courses online and running around to auditions, Stone made ends meet by working at a dog bakery.
Samira Wiley
Before Poussey was a fan favorite on Orange Is The New Black, Wiley was bartending to make money — even during filming. She only quit after she started getting recognized when Season 1 was released.
"I told some of my friends that work was starting to get a little weird because people were recognizing me,"she told Guff. "They were like, 'Samira, you need to stop bartending. Maybe this acting thing is going to work out, and you should just stop.' So I just stopped pretty much right when we were starting to film Season 2."
Blake Shelton
When Shelton was growing up in Ada, OK, he spent his summers working for his stepfather, roofing houses. What did he do with his earnings? He told The Wall Street Journalthat, “like any 15-year-old in Oklahoma, I found someone who was 21 to give the money to buy beer."
Idris Elba
When GQ asked Elba about portraying a Baltimore drug dealer on The Wire, he revealed he had a bit of real-life insight into that life. Back when he was DJing and trying to get a leg up in acting, he was also "running with cats" and selling bags of weed.
Eva Mendes
Mendes started working at a pizza place at her local mall when she was 15. But her manager quickly suggested she get another job after she was caught bribing a fellow employee to switch tasks with her so she wouldn't have to man the ovens, which she says were "super hot like a sauna."
As she recalled in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mendes didn't have to look far for her next gig. She just relocated across the food court to another fast-food joint, Hot Dog On A Stick.
Melissa McCarthy
As a summer job, McCarthy shucked oysters at a restaurant in Boulder, CO. But apparently the job didn't come with much training — she wasn't given gloves or an oyster knife, and at the end of the night, her boss told her she should go to the hospital because her hands "literally looked like I'd been mauled by a puma," she explains.
Rachel McAdams
When Glamour interviewed McAdams in 2012, they wanted to know: was her Wikipedia correct in listing her first job as McDonald's? It was true, she confessed, though she also admitted to not being the best employee — but not because she didn't care. In fact, she might have cared a little too much.
"I had a little bit of an OCD thing with hand-washing and just didn't have time. They were like, 'Hey, the drive-through's backing up. Stop washing your hands!'"
Samantha Bee
Bee's first job was far from glamorous, but it had great benefits: She met her husband (and former Daily Show coworker) Jason Jones when performing in a Sailor Moon stage production in their native Canada, a fact she revealed in her memoir, I Know I Am, But What Are You?
Tina Fey
Long before lighting up our TVs on SNL or 30 Rock, Fey had to figure out how to pay the bills while taking night classes at Second City. Her gig? Working the front desk at an Evanston, IL, YMCA — from 5:30 am to 2 p.m., which she described to Believer as "the worst shift imaginable."
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
Why One Company Gives Its Employees $10,000 — After They Quit
How To Exchange Your Unwanted Gift Cards At Target
Why You're Better Off Buying Guys' Products Over The Women's Version