11 Celebrities With Secret Nerdy Hobbies
When they're not shooting films or attending award shows, some celebrities are obsessing over <i>Lord of the Rings</i> or building model train sets.
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"Celebrities – They're Just Like Us!"
Yeah right, I usually think as I flip through entertainment magazines in my dentist's waiting room. Their pages feature glossy photos of Angelina Jolie leaving her personal trainer or Will Smith surfing on vacation with his famous family. I don't know about you, but fitness coaches are a bit above my monthly budget.
The dentist is probably the only place where I read gossip magazines, but even so, it's hard to escape celebrity culture. As I catch glimpses of sunny LA, life across news outlets, and social media feeds, I find it hard to believe that any celebrity is trudging through snow and ice, and braving public transportation to get to work every day.
As tech professionals, it might seem like you have nothing in common with Hollywood's rich and famous. In most cases you're probably right, but there is some overlap between the worlds of Hollywood and IT. After all, the films from this year's Oscar nominees had a lesson or two to teach CIOs.
[Everything you think about millennials is wrong, says IBM.]
Oscar films aside, you may also be surprised to know that some of today's biggest stars are proud of their inner nerds. That's right -- when they're not shooting films, recording albums, or posing on the red carpet, plenty of celebrities are happily living the nerd life and obsessing over video games or taking college courses.
There's Mayim Bialik, former child star and regular on The Big Bang Theory, who received her PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. Natalie Portman is another of Hollywood's smartest. She speaks six languages, graduated from Harvard, and was invited to Columbia University to speak to a class on terrorism and counterterrorism.
While not too many celebrities can boast an Ivy League education or a doctorate, there are plenty who admit to collecting action figures (and model trains), reading comic books, or playing Dungeons and Dragons and World of Warcraft -- to the point that it starts to interfere with their personal lives.
You might have a thing or two in common with today's celebrities after all. Click through to learn more about the nerdy hobbies of some popular red-carpet stars.
You might know him as a tough guy, but Vin Diesel has been playing Dungeons and Dragons since the 1970s. In addition to having one of his character's names -- "Melkor" -- tattooed near his belly button, Vin Diesel was tapped to pen the foreword for the book 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons and Dragons.
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James Bond became so addicted to the Halo franchise that it caused a rift between him and now ex-girlfriend Satsuki Mitchell.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
Not only is Rosario Dawson obsessed with Star Trek, she attends Comic-Con and co-created a comic series entitled Occult Crimes Taskforce about a woman who investigates magical crimes in New York City.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
It's okay, everyone, Mila Kunis was addicted to World of Warcraft, too. She eventually gave up the habit in 2012 because it began to consume too much of her time.
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It might seem like rock stars and model train sets go together like smartphones and water parks, but Rod Stewart will happily prove otherwise. Stewart keeps a model train set in his home. Every three years, he appears on the cover of Model Railroader magazine, which he claims "is better than Rolling Stone." Stewart is well-known among the modeling community for his 1,500-square-foot scale model of New York's Grand Central Station circa 1940, which he constructed on a road tour.
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DiCaprio is a big fan of Star Wars and took meticulous care of his massive figurine collection before auctioning off more than 300 lots in 2006 to benefit the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation for environmental protection. His collection contained boxed or carded TV, movie, and character figurines from the Star Wars series, all in their original packaging. The highlight of auction earnings was the sale of a rare vinyl Jawa figurine from the first edition of collectibles from the series, which fetched $4,500. DiCaprio also auctioned characters from E.T., The A-Team, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes.
(Image Source: Wikipedia)
Hanks has a habit of collecting vintage manual typewriters from the 1930s and 1940s. Most are still in working condition, and he often takes one or two along with him when he travels for work. To further prove dedication to his hobby, Hanks helped develop a new app called Hanx Writer for iPad. It's designed to look, act and sound like a traditional typewriter -- the same kind that everyone bought their desktops, laptops, and tablets to replace.
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Cage is another comic book lover and especially a big fan of Superman. (He even went so far as to name his son Kal-El after the superhero.) In 2011, Cage's carefully preserved copy of Action Comics No. 1, which features the first appearance of Superman, sold at auction for a record $2.1 million -- the first comic to be auctioned off for more than $2 million.
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"I'm a huge Lord of the Rings fan," Fox once said, according to Xfinity Entertainment. "And I'll go on the forums and they'll complain that Frodo is eating the Lembas bread outside of Mordor instead of in the Mines of Moria. And they get really mad." She adds, of hardcore comic and Tolkien fans, "You cannot focus completely on pleasing them because you'll never win."
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Sorry, Megan Fox, but Colbert wins for biggest Tolkien fan. He earned that title from Lord of the Rings and Hobbit director Peter Jackson, according to Entertainment Weekly.
"I have never met a bigger Tolkien geek in my life," Jackson admitted in an interview with EW. He also said that when Colbert paid a visit to the set, he took on resident Tolkien expert Philippa Boyens on a Tolkien quiz -- and won. "I have to say, his encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien is spectacular," claimed Jackson.
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You might know her from her role on The Wonder Years, but actress Danica McKellar has a new use for her time -- getting girls to develop a love for mathematics.
McKellar discovered her own passion for mathematics as an undergraduate at UCLA, where she collaborated with a professor and classmate to prove a new mathematical formula called the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem. After graduating with a math degree, McKellar decided she wanted to motivate other young women to pursue math. To do so, she writes entertaining math books aimed at girls in grades 5-12.
(Image source: Wikipedia)
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