12 celebrities you didn't know were teachers before they became famous

While on a gap year in 1987, Jackman worked at Uppingham School in England as a gym teacher. He ran into one of his former students, reporter Rollo Ross, on the red carpet at the 2013 Zurich Film Festival.

"How was your education? Did I set you up for life?" Jackman asked Ross in a moment that went viral.

"@RealHughJackman good to see you just now. Glad you didn't tell me to drop and give you twenty like the old days," Ross tweeted after the encounter.

In a 2012 interview with ESPN, Neeson said that he was fired for punching a student who threatened him with a knife.

"There were always discipline problems, getting them to settle down before you can start to teach them," Neeson said. "This particular kid did not want to settle down, he wanted to disrupt the whole class. So I went over to him and asked him to leave the classroom and stand outside. The next thing he pulled a knife on me. My reaction was to punch him, which I shouldn't have done, but I felt threatened."

Crow graduated with a degree in music composition, performance, and teaching from the University of Missouri in 1984. She taught music classes for children with special needs for two years before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a recording artist.

True to his love of theater, Miranda had his students perform the Shakespeare works they read in class.

"I taught seventh grade English and one of my two favorite things to teach was 'Things Fall Apart' by Chinua Achebe ... The other one was 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,'" he told the Harvard Crimson in 2012. "The best way to teach any Shakespeare is to get up and do it because they're plays — they're not pieces of literature to be read — and so I'd make every kid in the class play a part every day, and we read through the whole play, and it was a lot of fun."

Williams mostly taught high school, but also worked as a substitute for kindergarten and seventh grade.

"High school is my favorite just because of my ability to connect with the students," he told PureWow in 2021. "I think it stems from the fact that high school was a real shift, a real fork in the road for me as a student and it helped me get on the right track. It was a real hinge point in my life so I think that's what drew me to it. But kindergarten was a lot of fun. Always an adventure, it certainly helped me prepare more for parenthood than anything else. I totally felt like Kindergarten Cop."

Sting, also known as Gordon Sumner, graduated from Northumbria University with a degree in teaching studies in 1973. He worked as a teacher for two years before becoming frontman of The Police.

Bialik earned a PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. She put her academic knowledge to use teaching college classes, starring as neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler on "The Big Bang Theory," and now as one of the hosts of "Jeopardy!"

"I sat in the office and made $42.50 a day, and whenever a teacher was absent, I'd substitute," Crystal said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2004. "I taught everything from English to auto shop. I'd be at the front of a class saying, 'Listen, I don't know anything about science, but these two guys walk into a bar...' I'd only been out of school for a few years. I couldn't bring myself to call the teachers by their first names."

When asked by a Parade magazine reader which line of work was more difficult — music or teaching — Simons answered: "It depends how high you want to reach. The rewards are much greater in the music business, but the pitfalls are very deep. In one, you're in front of an audience who may not want to be there. In the other, you're in front of an audience who worships at your feet!"

Flack got her first teaching job when she was 19 years old.

"I taught 12th grade English literature, but every two-and-a-half, almost three weeks, I would see at least every child in that school, and this was what they call a coordinated school, which meant for that area it was the only Black school available," Flack told NPR in 2006. "And so I had kids from preschool all the way through 12th grade, and I taught every one of them something musical."

After graduating from Columbia University in 2006, Koenig taught eighth graders at the now-closed David Ruggles Junior High School in Brooklyn until Vampire Weekend landed a record deal in 2007.

"It was a pretty hectic lifestyle," Koenig told MTV News. "I mean, [being a full-time musician] is a hectic lifestyle too, but to teach all day, then go record or try to play a show, and then wake up and go to work again was pretty difficult."

Hamm was a drama teacher at his alma mater, John Burroughs High School in St. Louis, Missouri, for one year. One of his students there was actress Ellie Kemper.

"I think teaching is one of the great professions on the planet and I had the good fortune to do it for a year," Hamm said. "And I would definitely go back to it, and I might still."