Celebs With Surprisingly High IQs

A comic legend was born when a tall ginger took over for David Letterman and premiered a show called Late Night With Conan O'Brien in 1993, but before he cracked jokes for a living, O'Brien hit the books as a history and literature major at Harvard. He sharpened his communication skills writing for the Harvard Lampoon and graduated magna cum laude from the Ivy League school in 1985. 

Diploma in hand, Coco wasn't quite sure what his future would look like. "I didn't know what I was going to do, I didn't know how I was going to do it," he told USC's second annual Comedy @SCA Festival. "But I remember thinking it's not going to be medical school, it's not going to be law school, the male modeling is not going to happen, and it's going to be, definitely, me being in show business."

You know him as Ivan Drago, the Terminator-like Soviet boxer who killed Apollo Creed in Rocky 4, but you can also think of Dolph Lundgren as the greatest chemical engineer who never was. 

With a degree in chemical engineering from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology and a master's degree in the same from the University of Sydney, the 6'5" karate black belt received the prestigious Fulbright scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reported NPR. Somebody cast this man as a Bond villain already.

Brought into Hollywood to give Marilyn Monroe some blonde bombshell competition, Jayne Mansfield went on to become one of the defining sex symbols and icons of the 1950s. With a supposed IQ of 163 and the ability to speak five languages, the curvaceous beauty understood that the general public at the time was "more interested in 40-21-35"–her legendary measurements. 

With a brain like this, it's no wonder her daughter is able to solve so many crimes on Law & Order: SVU. That's right, Mansfield's daughter is Detective Olivia Benson herself, Mariska Hargitay. 

Before he became everyone's favorite conspiracy theorist on X-Files, actor David Duchovny earned a bachelor's degree in English literature at Princeton and a master's degree in English from Yale University to fulfill his dream of becoming a poet. His doctorate from Yale was reportedly cut short after television came calling. 

"You have a fantasy when you're young, that you're going to be Nietzsche, that you have access to the profoundest truths," he told The Independent. "But screenwriting doesn't sustain a great deal of critical thought. You have to be careful of pedantry and cant and preaching. I don't really have anything profound to say. If I had, I imagine I would have been a philosopher. But I don't, really. On the other hand, I'm not an idiot, either."

Did you fantasize about becoming Friedrich Nietzsche when you grew up? 

She'll always be our Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter franchise, but in 2014, Emma Watson graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in English literature. 

But the road to pomp and circumstance wasn't without its challenges. "On the first day, I walked into the canteen and everyone went completely silent and turned to look at me," she told The Sunday Times (via E! News.) "I had to say to myself, 'It's okay, you can do this. You just have to take a deep breath and gather your courage.'"

Even though she had to take two semesters off due to work commitments, Watson's smarts eventually earned her a place among Ivy League alums.