The bizarre early jobs Hollywood stars had before they were famous

Hollywood stars are just like us in some ways. Even the biggest actors in the world had to find a way to make some cash before they were famous. Most of them had quite normal jobs, working in bars and restaurants or making coffee in the cafes of Los Angeles.

However, there are some famous stars of the big screen who previously did very unusual and unique things in their careers. Not everyone spent their early adult years doing something as mundane as flipping burgers or pulling pints.

So let's have a look at some of the actors who've had the strangest pre-Hollywood careers.

David Schwimmer

Like so many Hollywood stars, Friends actor David Schwimmer spent some time in the restaurant biz — working as a roller-skating server at a Chicago diner. But in a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he spoke about another of his careers, working for his mother — a divorce lawyer. “I would be the guy who would pop out of the bushes and serve you divorce papers,” he said.

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Schwimmer explained that this job once led him to a very unusual celebrity interaction, serving divorce papers to famous rocker Rod Stewart. “Thank goodness I’ve never run into him since,” said Schwimmer. “I don’t even know if he knows. I don’t think he knows."

Brad Pitt

It feels criminal that they would ever hide a man who looks like Brad Pitt inside an enormous chicken suit. But that's exactly what happened to the Fight Club star in one of his early jobs, in which he had to dress up as an enormous chicken mascot to promote the opening of a fast food restaurant.

In a 2019 interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Pitt said he feels "no shame" about the career choices that led him to that point. "Man's gotta eat," he said.

Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg found an unusual use for the skills she gained by becoming a licensed beautician. After moving to California, she secured a job in a morgue doing hair and make-up for the recently deceased. "It's a rough gig," she told Oprah's Master Class. "You have to be a certain kind of person. And you have to love people in order to make them worthy of a great send-off."

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Goldberg explained that her boss at the mortuary had a dark sense of humour, which resulted in a prank in which he hid in one of the drawers used for bodies in order to scare her. "I run, boom, into the door. Knocked myself out," said Goldberg. Frankly, we'd have done the same.

Terry Crews

Terry Crews is better known these days for his impressive physique and career both in the NFL and as one of Hollywood's funniest men. But before he succeeded in football, he earned an art scholarship thanks to his impressive skills in both drawing and painting. This led him to a very unusual job as a courtroom sketch artist.

"My first job in entertainment, I drew courtroom sketches for the worst murder case in Flint, Michigan history," Crews told Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2014. During the early part of his football career, he would also make money by painting portraits of his teammates.

Matthew McConaughey

Matthew McConaughey is an idiosyncratic guy, so it's only natural that he had a very unusual job during his pre-fame years in Texas. He was employed to rake the sand traps on a country club golf course but, as he explained to GQ in 2014, his job got even more unique when he was approached by his boss to become an armadillo exterminator. McConaughey said it was "the most fun part" of his job.

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He explained: "The greenskeeper came to me and said: 'Look, we're having a problem with some armadillos that are eating the greens and, as well as raking the traps, I'd like to hire you for the next two weeks to come out from 10pm until 3.30am when you start raking the traps. I'm gonna give you a .22 and you just spotlight them on the green and just pick them off'."

Channing Tatum

He's best known today for his movie work, including as the lead in the Magic Mike franchise, but Channing Tatum used his impressive performance skills very differently prior to his breakout in the world of cinema. As if preparing for the work he would later do as Magic Mike, Tatum worked as a stripper after he left college, using the stage name Chan Crawford.

"My sister was not happy about it," Tatum told Howard Stern in 2015. "She even showed up the first night to try to shame me out of going on." But Tatum persevered with the job and even performed a clown-inspired stripper routine on one memorable occasion. Given the career helped launch a movie trilogy that made a combined $350m (£287m) at the box office, it turned out well for Tatum.

Sean Connery

Before he landed the role of James Bond and became a household name, Sir Sean Connery hit very hard times indeed. In the early 1950s, he was struggling for money and for somewhere to live, which is when he took a job polishing coffins in the Scottish town of Haddington. According to one of his former colleagues, he even slept in the coffins on some nights.

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"He came there to start work about 1950 and had nowhere to stay. I know he spent a few nights sleeping in a coffin just after he started," Tommy Wark told The Scotsman. "He wasn't Sean Connery then – we all knew him as Tom. I was on the joinery side and he worked with two women from Craigmillar who did the polishing of the caskets."

Christopher Walken

Christopher Walken has had a fascinating life in the Hollywood spotlight and his mother was keen to push him and his brothers into showbiz right from the start of their lives. They appeared in TV sketches, so the young Walken was around entertainment from an early age. When he was 16, he took this to its logical conclusion and joined the circus as a lion tamer for a single summer. Naturally.

"I didn’t run away, I just got a job as a trainee lion tamer. Who’s going to turn that down?" Walken told The Guardian in 2021. "I would come into the cage and wave my whip, and she’d lazily get up and sit like a dog and maybe give a little roar. I like cats a lot. I’ve always liked cats. They’re great company."

Chris Hemsworth

When the young Chris Hemsworth was just 14 years old — with the prospect of being a Marvel superhero a very long way away — he worked in a pharmacy and had a very unusual speciality. As he explained in a 2019 segment with Jimmy Fallon, his role was to clean and repair rented-out breast pumps.

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"Pharmacies would rent them out and they'd ... come back covered in dry milk, so I'd have a toothbrush and I'd clean the dry milk," said Hemsworth. It's not the most glamorous of beginnings for the man who would become the God of Thunder, but we all have to start somewhere.

Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren honed her performing skills while growing up in Essex, getting a job as a "blagger" for an amusement arcade and fairground on the Southend seafront. Her job was to encourage punters into the amusements and on to the fairground rides. Henri Grecourt, her boss, told the Southend Echo in 2007 that Mirren was "pretty good" at the job.

"Working on a fairground attracts people and they think it is a glamorous job," said Grecourt. "She wanted to experience the public. She was bubbly and was quite ambitious. She always had a nice, posh talking voice and I still remember the way she spoke to me."