6 Famous People Who Got Their Start with Regular Jobs

Here's a fact: many celebrities, before celebrities became, they were once one of us—i.e., regular people who had to pay for rent, utilities, and credit card bills with normal jobs like "working at McDonald's," "praying mantis exterminator. even the brightest stars had to start with their simple first jobs before making it big! Here are 6 famous people you might be surprised to learn once worked as teachers, flight attendant, and even praying mantis exterminator.

1. Taylor Swift

For her first job, worked on a Christmas tree farm. “My job was picking the praying mantis pods off of the trees, collecting them so that the bugs wouldn't hatch inside people's houses.” taylor told Esquire in 2014. "The only reason that was my job was because I was too little to help lift trees."

2. Nicki Minaj

Nicki has repeatedly discussed her pre-fame job as a waitress at the finest chain of casual dining seafood restaurants as a waitress in Red Lobster. "I like dealing with people, but I don’t really like a lot of bullshit, so maybe customer service wasn’t the best job for me," she told GQ in 2014. She was fired from Red Lobster after she followed a couple who'd stolen her pen into the parking lot and flipped them off.

3. Meghan Markle

Before she was a Suits actress (or, hello, a member of the royal fam), Meghan Markle was a professional calligrapher. Between 2004 and 2005, she worked for a while at Paper Source and freelanced part-time — she actually sent out invitations for Robin Thicke's wedding to Paula Patton letter.

4. Beyoncé

It's hard to imagine Beyonce as anything other than BEYONCÉ, but she was also once a child, forced to make ends meet by doing mundane tasks for her parents. “From 6 to 9 years old, I would sing myself and perform little shows for women who wanted hot presses, curly hair, and good conversation,” Beyoncé said of working at her mother’s salon in 2011. "I swept my hair from the floor to get a tip.

5. Brad Pitt

You may not also know that Brad Pitt's first job in Hollywood was at an El Pollo Loco chicken restaurant, where he had to stand outside in a chicken costume, waving to potential customers passing by.

6. Kanye West

Before he was designing his own Yeezy collections, Kanye worked as a sales associate at Gap during his teen years. "It's funny that I worked at the Gap in high school, because in my past 15 years it seems like that's the place I stood in my creative path — to be the gap, the bridge," Kanye told Paper in 2015