Though known for the acting and music that has made them famous, a number of our favorite entertainment celebrities are actually way smarter than the average Joe.
In no particular order, this is Business Insider’s list of 30 of the smartest entertainment celebrities.
1. Natalie Portman:
The “Black Swan” lead has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard — making her the first alum to win an Academy Award — and took graduate courses at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She enrolled at Harvard as Natalie Herschlag, her birth name, for a bit of anonymity, but her professors noted that she was an exceptional student.
She speaks six languages and has twice been published in scientific journals. As she once told the New York Post, “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”
2. Ashton Kutcher:
The former “Punk’d” host lost his scholarships to study Engineering at MIT & Purdue when he broke into his high school as a prank. He ended up at the University of Iowa, but dropped out at age 19 to pursue modeling. Kutcher now divides his time between acting and smart investing — in companies like Airbnb, Spotify, and Foursquare.
“The sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart,” Kutcher said at this year’s Teen Choice Awards.
3. Conan O’Brien:
Conan O’Brien was a history and literature major at Harvard University, where the school newspaper dubbed him the “pre-eminent jokester” of the class of ’85. It makes sense, as he was also the president of the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret social organization that published a humor magazine. He graduated magna cum laude.
His 72-page senior thesis, entitled “The ‘Old Child’ in Faulkner and O’Connor,” argued that “the New South’s emerging identity is manifested in the literature of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor via the motif of children that age too quickly.”
4. Cindy Crawford:
Cindy Crawford, who graduated as the valedictorian of her high school class, signed her first modeling contract in 1984. Initially she used the money to supplement her scholarship to study Chemical Engineering at Northwestern University, but she ditched school to launch her career.
By ’85, she appeared in the pages of Vogue, and would go on to become one of the original Big Six supermodels.
5. Ben Stein:
Ben Stein, who played the droning economics teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is an accomplished economics professor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The Yale Law School grad has authored more than 30 books.
According to his official bio, he worked as a poverty lawyer, trade regulation lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and professor of law and economics at University of California–Santa Cruz and Pepperdine University.
6 & 7. Jake & Maggie Gyllenhaal:
When Maggie Gyllenhaal returned to her alma mater to accept a personal achievement award, she said her Columbia education taught her to “acknowledge that I really know nothing.” A thirst for knowledge led her, as a first-year English student, to sneak into the dean’s senior seminar.
Little brother Jake Gyllenhaal enrolled when Maggie was a senior, and hoped to major in Eastern religions. Following the success of “October Sky,” he dropped out after his sophomore year to concentrate on acting.
8. Mindy Kaling:
The Dartmouth College theater major earned an Eleanor Frost Playwriting Award in 1999. As a college student, Kaling illustrated a daily comic for the school paper called “Badly Drawn Girl,” which “riffed on day-to-day campus life and took a witty stab at everything from fraternity life to alumni.”
Known for her roles in “The Office” and “The Mindy Project,” Kaling was recently named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential List.
9. Quentin Tarantino:
Despite his intelligence, Tarantino never liked school, except for history class “because it was kind of like the movies,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
The famous film director, whose IQ of 160 is the same as physicist Stephen Hawking, dropped out of high school and went on to produce some of the most awarded and brilliant films of all time, including “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.”
10. Matt Damon:
Damon may very well be as smart as his character Will Hunting. As a Harvard student, a playwriting course assignment led to the development of a rough version of “Good Will Hunting.” He later completed the project with his childhood buddy Ben Affleck.
Damon ultimately dropped out to pursue an acting career instead, but the Crimson school still awarded him the prestigious Harvard Arts Medal earlier this year.
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