Some celebrities are more than just pretty faces. Here are 31 stars who are smarter than you.
Danica McKellar
Danica McKellar might not have been as good a dancer as the others, but she’s better at math than them. She’s authored four books advocating math education for girls.
Brooke Shields
Brooke Shields was an actress and the most famous model in the world in her teens. She walked away from her fame (for a while) to pursue a degree at Princeton.
Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman is a Harvard graduate, fluent in six languages, and has been published in two scientific journals.
Ken Jeong
Ken Jeong got his acting start in Knocked Up when he played an OB, which happens to be his regular profession.
Emma Watson
Emma Watson’s graduation from Brown University was a big deal, trending on social media. She really is as smart as Hermione Granger.
Rashida Jones
Rashida Jones wrote musical scores while earning her degree in comparative religion at Harvard.
John Krasinski
John Krasinski studied at Brown and taught English abroad before becoming an actor.
Kate Beckinsale
Kate Beckinsale has a whole lot of brains to go with all that beauty. She’s fluent in four languages.
Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher’s the perfect pick for Steve Jobs. He was accepted to both MIT and Purdue but had his scholarships revoked after a prank at his high school.
Conan O’Brien
Conan O’Brien graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. The funny ones are always smart.
James Woods
James Woods had a near-perfect SAT score and has an IQ of 184. That’s higher than Einstein’s estimated score.
Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster has long been lauded as a smart cookie. She’s a French scholar who studied at Yale.
Colin Firth
Colin Firth commissioned and co-authored a paper on human brain research to see whether or not having different political leanings is brain-based.
Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey is a Julliard-trained actor. Clearly that education has worked out well for him.
Jordana Brewster
Jordana Brewster gained fame after the first Fast & Furious film. Then she went to Yale where her fame shielded her from the fact that her grandfather was a former Yale president.
Matt Damon
Matt Damon started the screenplay for what became Good Will Hunting while he was a student at Harvard.
Mayim Bialik
Mayim Bialik plays a neurobiologist on The Big Bang Theory. That’s not too far off from the real world where she holds a Ph.D in neuroscience.
James Franco
James Franco racks up degrees like some people collect, well, whatever it is they collect. He currently has five degrees from five schools and is a Ph.D candidate at Yale.
Mindy Kaling
Mindy Kaling is an award-winning playwright with a degree from Dartmouth.
Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal
Star siblings Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal both attended Columbia. Maggie graduated and Jake dropped out to pursue acting.
Cindy Crawford
Supermodel Cindy Crawford is more than just a pretty face, for sure. She holds a degree in chemical engineering from Northwestern University.
Edward Norton
Edward Norton probably didn’t spend too many days looking like this while he was earning a degree at Yale and becoming fluent in Japanese.
David Duchovny
David Duchovny has degrees from TWO Ivy League schools, Princeton and Yale. He abandoned his Ph.D studies after booking a beer commercial in 1987.
Sharon Stone
Sharon Stone’s basic instinct is learning. She has an IQ of 154 and started college at just 15 years old.
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino has an IQ of 160 but he never liked school and dropped out before graduating high school.
John Legend
John Legend earned scholarships to Georgetown and Morehouse but decided on UPenn. He worked as a consultant before making it in music.
Lisa Kudrow
Lisa Kudrow has a biology degree from Vassar. Six months after graduating, just before pursuing an advanced degree, she decided to go into acting.
Nolan Gould
Modern Family’s Nolan Gould is a kid genius for real. He finished high school at just 13 years old!
Flavor Flav
Nope! We’re not joking! Flava Flav is a musical prodigy who played over 15 instruments by the time he hit high school.
Ben Stein
Ben Stein is a renowned economist and the author of over 30 books. His reputation as a smartypants precedes him.