Before they were famous, some of the biggest celebrities in the world were working odd jobs to make ends meet, just hustling and scraping by like anybody else. This list runs through celebs who found employment in strange and surprising places prior to landing their dream jobs.
Do you work at Olive Garden? McDonald's perhaps? Well, maybe you're about to hit it big in Hollywood! Yes, this could be your origin story, because just like the rest of us, Kanye West, Megan Fox, Brad Pitt, and Helen Mirren all had to take some pretty menial, bizarre, and even humiliating jobs before they made it.
That's just a taste of the celeb strangeness you'll find on this list. From selling pens over the phone to stripping for a couple dollar bills to doing makeup on dead people and even taming lions, the list of jobs that the rich and famous had before they were rich and famous reads like Kramer's resume on Seinfeld.
Vote up the stars you think worked the best (or the worst) gigs before Hollywood came calling.
Before she played royalty, Dame Helen Mirren worked at the Kursaal Amusement Park trying to attract people to come onto the various rides. In the US we'd call her a "barker," but over in the UK, Mirren was known as a "blagger".
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In her early days, Victoria "Posh" Beckham dressed up as a sperm on roller skates for a BBC sexual education show called Body Matters. This was pre-Spice Girls and pre-David Beckham, of course, though we're sure she was the poshest sperm that ever lived even back then.
Dustin Hoffman held many jobs while trying to make it as an actor, including being a doorman, stringing Hawaiian leis, checking coats, and even typing up the Yellow Pages, alongside 80 women. "I had no shame," Hoffman has said about his early job search.
Before bellowing his way through action roles, Scottish actor Gerard Butler studied law at Glasgow University. He even worked as a civil lawyer in Edinburgh, reportedly drinking his way through the job until he was fired a week before qualifying for full fledged lawyerdom.
Matthew Cole Weiss
