Amy Adams spent just a few weeks as a Hooters girl after graduating from high school. “I wasn’t cut out to be a waitress, and I certainly wasn’t cut out to be a Hooters waitress,” Adams said. “That was a short-lived ambition.” But apparently, it was worth it: “I had to buy a car,” the Enchanted star said. “I was sick of taking the bus.”
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As a 13-year-old, Orlando Bloom loved his job at a shooting range. "I was a clay trapper,” he said in 2006. “People would go clay-pigeon shooting on the weekends, and when they said 'pull,' I was the one who released the pigeon. It was wild."
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Despite his good looks, Brad Pitt wasn’t an instant success when he arrived in Hollywood. His first job was pushing fast food in a chicken suit at El Pollo Loco.
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Beyonce got her start performing in her mother’s popular Houston hair salon. But sometimes her work was a little less glamorous. “I would work as a receptionist and sweep up hair,” the singer says.
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The rock and roll icon once hoped for a much duller career—one in finance, which he studied at the London School of Economics. And before that, Jagger humbly sold ice cream from a pushcart.
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"Don't eat too much ice cream or you're not going to fit into your costume,” Gwen Stefani said of her days spent scrubbing floors at Dairy Queen. “I got so fat when I worked there,” the star said in a 2005 radio interview. She decided to hang up her uniform "when I was rubbing between the seats [of the restaurant] with a toothbrush trying to get the fudge off."
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Notorious for being caught playing bongos naked, McConaughey has always been a free spirit, heading to Australia for a year after high school. There he shoveled chicken poop, washed dishes, worked in construction and in a courtroom, and did several other jobs. Back in America, he studied to be a lawyer for a bit before deciding movies were his true calling.
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The Ghostbuster sold hot chestnuts outside of a Chicago grocery store two years after graduating college, before finally getting in to the Second City comedy troupe.
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Cruise had a newspaper route for the Louisville Courier-Journal when he briefly lived in Kentucky.
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In the early 80s, George Clooney drifted from job to job, DJing in a Cincinnati club, cutting tobacco in his relatives’ fields, and selling women’s shoes at McAlpin’s department store and men’s suits at Nadler’s menswear. He earned enough cash to move to Los Angeles in 1982 and pursue his dreams.
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Young people desperate to get into showbiz are often willing to take not-so-glamorous jobs as long as they’re close to the stage. In Washington, D.C. in 1953, a 16-year-old Beatty scored a gig shooing rats away from an alley behind a theater.
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After spending a few months in prison, future rock star Ozzy Osbourne worked in a slaughterhouse. “The first job they gave me was they gave a big pile of sheep stomachs, and my job was to stick a knife in their stomachs and empty the stomachs,” Osbourne says. “And for the first two or three weeks, I did nothing but throw up everyday. The smell was just unbelievable.”
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Christopher Walken joined the circus and became a lion tamer—but don’t be too impressed. "There was this very old lioness named Sheba, and she was completely very friendly, like a dog,” Walken said. “I had a whip and a hat, and I'd go into the cage and Sheba would jump up on this box and I'd wave the whip at her, and she'd get up and go, 'Whraaah!' Everybody would applaud and that was it."
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“My first job, sadly, was telemarketing,” Vince Vaughn says. “We would sell tickets to the Lake County Sheriff's Police Rodeo. I don't know if there ever was a rodeo. I'm calling these families asking them if they wanted to go to a rodeo and if they said no, I was supposed to push these orphan packages. It was horrible, and these were seniors and people on fixed incomes.
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The comedian was one of the lucky few to actually like her first job. “I was driving cars out of a car wash, you know, once the car comes out, you get in and you wipe it. That was exciting to me to drive the nice cars,” DeGeneres told CNN. But not all of her working life has been so pleasant. “The worst job I ever had—and I lasted a half a day—was I worked in a glove factory in Atlanta, Texas. It was horrible.” She checked for flaws like too many fingers.
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