We generally don’t think of people who get dressed up and play for a living as the brightest bulbs in the bunch, but some definitely give off that impression more than others. Like, would anyone be surprised to learn that Natasha Lyonne has successfully defended a dissertation on The Divine Comedy?
To be clear, she hasn’t, as far as we know. In fact, the really impressive ones are sometimes the ones you’d least expect. Like…
Lisa Kudrow
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Phoebe Buffay may have given her Friends headaches, but for the actor who played her, they were the family business. Her father is a doctor who specializes in the research and treatment of headaches, so after studying biology at Vassar, she worked for him for eight years doing medical research and even earned an author credit on an academic paper about the correlation between left-handedness and cluster headaches. Then she got the Friends job, which we can all agree was a better use of her time.
Rowan Atkinson
The pratfall reinvented itself for Rowan Atkinson, but despite what his bumbling persona would have you believe, he was an academic all star, first at prep school, where he was a classmate of future prime minister Tony Blair, then at Oxford, where he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering. That’s also where he met Richard Curtis, with whom he would go on to develop the Black Adder and Mr. Bean franchises, so that was the end of that. His master’s thesis was a “Simulation Study of Self-Tuning Control Laws.” We bet it was wacky.
Nolan Gould
As the parents of Modern Family’s Luke Dunphy once said, “There’s ‘book smart,’ and then there’s ‘street smart,’ and then there’s Luke,” but the actor who played him seems to be brimming with both. He skipped four grades in school before deciding to just graduate at age 13. Most people do that so they can get a head start on higher learning, but Gould seems to have just wanted to get this whole school thing over with, so he’s smarter than all of them.
Greg Graffin
The frontman of Bad Religion’s academic accomplishments might be more impressive than his musical ones, and that’s really saying something. He has a PhD in zoology from Cornell, where he’s also taught natural science classes in addition to UCLA, and published several books on the theory of evolution. Imagine walking into science class and your teacher is Professor American Jesus.
Iggy Pop
Speaking of punk classics, in true DIY spirit, Iggy Pop never earned any fancy degrees. That didn’t stop him, however, from publishing his reflections on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the journal of classical scholarship Classics Ireland in 1995. It’s a short essay, and it may be the only one in the journal’s history to contain both the words “dude” and “ass,” but you get the feeling that, under the right circumstances, you could get Iggy to go on about Gibbon for as long as you want. The only question is how long that might be.