It’s Black History Month! To celebrate our favorite Black actors and celebrities, here are 15 icons who had rather regular day jobs before their big careers kicked into high gear. Let it be a reminder that success can come at any point in one’s life. There’s no timeline!
“I was in a stay-in-school program. So as long as I was in school full time, I could work 20 hours a week,” Taraji P. Henson said on The Late Show in 2019. The most important aspect of her job at the Pentagon? “I had a security clearance.”
“I was a contracting specialist, so I bought anything from radar equipment to surveillance equipment to furniture,” Wanda Sykes said on The Late Show in 2019 of her days working for NASA. “I had top secret security clearance.”
Nicki told Vogue in 2023 that she worked several jobs before her music career took off, including as a Red Lobster server, telemarketer, and receptionist. She even sold fire extinguishers for a time.
Denzel Washington worked as a garbageman when he was 20 in Mount Vernon, New York. “I was a garbageman,” he told Larry King in 2013. “I worked back of the truck, 22 square blocks. That’s hard. There’s nothing that we do in the movies that’s hard.”
“I worked reservations for United Airlines, and that wasn’t even a bad job because I got to play different characters when I answered the phone. But then you’d put someone on hold and come back and not remember the character you were playing!” told Backstage a few years ago.
In 1955, Morgan Freeman enlisted in the Air Force after high school instead of heading to college. According to the Department of Defense, he worked as an automatic radar repairman. Automatic tracking radar stations were a precursor to today’s GPS.
A couple of years after college, Natasha Rothwell worked as a high school teacher at the KIPP charter school in the Bronx for four years. “That was my first way of being like, proximity to passion will make my bread job a lot easier,” she told Jezebel in 2018.
While trying to make it as an actor, Kerry held several jobs, including a New York Public School system substitute teacher. “It was a perfect job for an actor because you get a call in the morning saying, ‘We need a teacher.’ If I had an audition, I wouldn’t go. But if I didn’t have an audition, which was most days, I would go and work in a school,” she said on The Late Show in 2017. She was working as a teacher before her first big movie role in Save the Last Dance. “It did not pay me a lot of money, so after the movie came out, I went back to substitute teaching for a while.” However, she couldn’t work in high school anymore because kids were skipping their classes to see her substitute teach.
According to Variety, Janelle James had many jobs before her comedy career picked up steam. This included food delivery service to startup workspaces called the Joy of Not Cooking.
William Stanford Davis worked as a radio DJ. After college, he was employed at an R&B radio station. He then moved over to a country western station in Denton, Texas. “I started DJing at 14,” William said on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2024.
Ava Duvernay had a full career as a film publicist before she ever picked up a camera at 32. “For my first five films I still worked my day job. The day I went to Sundance as a director, I thought maybe I should focus on this full-time. And that’s what I did. I started giving my clients away to these small agencies, not taking new contracts, and within two to three months, I was a full-time filmmaker,” she told Variety in 2019.
According to the Guardian, Samuel L. Jackson worked as a social worker for two years during his early days in Los Angeles.
According to the NAACP, Angela Bassett worked as a photo researcher at U.S. News & Report magazine after college while auditioning for acting roles on the side.
Oprah might’ve become a household name through her mononymous talk show, but she got her start on TV as a local newscaster in Baltimore. She worked at WJZ TV. In 2023, Oprah said of her time in Baltimore, “The eight years that I lived here were some of the most significant years of my life.”
Craig Robinson, who is from Chicago, taught music to kindergarten through eighth-grade students at a school in Indiana for a time.
Did any of these surprise you? Better yet, did you learn you’ve worked the same job as one of these celebs? Let us know in the comments below!
Check out more Black-centered content by exploring how BuzzFeed is celebrating Black History Month this year! Of course, the content doesn’t end after February. Follow BuzzFeed’s Cocoa Butter on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to keep up with our latest Black culture content year-round.
