Jobs Celebrities Had Before They Became Famous

When a celebrity attains fame, it seems that they just got out of nowhere. But, like every profession, one would have to work their way up the ladder.

Here are some celebrities and the jobs they had before fame

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex: Much before she became a member of the British royalty by marrying Prince Harry, the former actress earned her rent money by employing her calligraphy skills. “It was because I went to an all-girls Catholic school for like six years during the time when kids actually had handwriting class. I’ve always had a propensity for getting the cursive down pretty well. What it evolved into was my pseudo-waitressing job when I was auditioning. I didn’t wait tables. I did calligraphy for the invitations for, like, Robin Thicke and Paula Patton’s wedding,” she said in an interview with Esquire in 2013.

Justin Trudeau: According to a Washington Post report,The Canadian prime minister worked as a high school teacher, snowboard instructor, nightclub bouncer and bungee jumping coach, before he entered politics. As a student at the University of British Columbia back in the ’90s, he would go to Whistler, Canada, to teach teenagers how to snowboard.

George Clooney: Before the “Ocean’s Eleven” star found success in movies, he took up several odd jobs such as selling insurance and cutting tobacco. Recalling his days of working as a door-to-door insurance salesman on “Larry King Live,” Clooney said, “I was a horrible insurance salesman. I’ll tell you why. The selling part I could do but then they wanted you to always tack on a little something extra. You know we’d take it from, you know, we’d take it from a whole life insurance to term life insurance and put some money away in an annuity for them or in an IRA but maybe you could use a little other insurance as well…And I couldn’t because you felt like you were pulling their leg then.”

Hugh Jackman: Before he became famous as Wolverine from the “X-Men” films, Jackman taught physical education at Uppingham School in Rutland, England for a year. In a funny incident, he ran into one of his former pupils at the Zurich Film Festival in 2013. Jackman recognized the student, who grew up to be a reporter and was asking him questions. He told him, “We go way back. I used to teach you at high school, in P.E. I wanna know how your physical education is progressing. It’s very important to me.” 

Barack Obama: The former U.S. President spent the summer of 1978 working at a Baskin Robbins ice cream counter in Honolulu, Hawaii, working through “rows and rows of rock-hard ice cream.” Recalling the stint, he wrote in a LinkedIn post in 2016, “My first summer job wasn’t exactly glamorous, but it taught me some valuable lessons. Responsibility. Hard Work. Balancing a job with friends, family and school.” 

Brad Pitt: The “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” star worked several jobs in Los Angeles, California, U.S. One of the earlier ones included dressing up as a giant chicken and handing out El Pollo Loco restaurant fliers to passing cars. Speaking on the experience on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in 2019, he simply reasoned, “Man’s gotta eat.” Apart from that, he also worked as a furniture mover and a driver for strippers for two months. 

Kanye West: The 21-time Grammy-winning rapper’s first job was at a GAP store during his high school days, where he worked in the customer service department. “When I was working at the GAP at 15, I don’t think I had any desire to actually make clothes, but I always felt like that’s what I wanted to be around. I loved the fabrics, I loved the colors, I loved the proportions. Abercrombie was too expensive for me and the GAP was too expensive for me. Even though I worked at the GAP, I didn’t get enough hours to get a discount because I was a part-time employee, because I went to high school,” he wrote in Paper Magazine’s American Dream issue.

Johnny Depp: Before finding fame as an actor, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star worked as a telemarketer selling pens over the phone. Speaking to Interview magazine, he said, “I marketed pens – on the phone. But the beauty of the gig was that you had to call these strangers and say, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ You made up a name, like, ‘Hey, it’s Edward Quartermaine from California. You’re eligible to receive this grand-father clock or a trip to Tahiti… You promise them all these things if they buy a gross of pens. It was just awful. But I actually think that was the first experience I had with acting.”