13 Celebrities Who Are Way Smarter Than You

Let's be honest, we don't imagine celebrities to be all that smart. We might think they are talented in their field, but not necessarily smart. And it just wouldn't be fair because who can be good-looking, talented, rich, famous and smart?

And a lot of celebrities prove themselves not to be very intelligent when they engage in drama and Twitter spats and the like. Also when they get papped rolling out of clubs drunk and doing some really stupid and sometimes illegal stuff. We're looking at you Justin Bieber.

But the unfortunate truth for us is, that quite a few celebrities are indeed good-looking, talented, rich, famous and incredibly smart. Some of them even have genius IQs that could compete with the smartest people in existence like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. It's crazy!

But what's going to really surprise you are the celebrities that are actually on this list. You will not believe it. Ken Jeong, the guy who is in the Hangover movies, is on this list! The guy who plays Mr Bean is on this list! It really goes to show that you can't judge a book by its cover.

13 Natalie Portman

You know Natalie Portman as the stunning beauty and talented actor who won an Academy Award for her performance in Black Swan (2010). Portman isn't just a skilled actor, she also has big brains! She graduated from the prestigious Ivy League school Harvard in 2003 with a B.A. in Psychology. While at Harvard she contributed to a study that was published in a scientific journal, "Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy". Okay… Many of us wouldn't know what that means, let alone be able to contribute to a proper study on the subject. Portman also has a strong interest in foreign languages and has studied Japanese, Arabic, French and German - you know, the easy ones… Who can't speak Japanese these days? So, it's safe to say that Natalie Portman is very smart.

12 Rowan Atkinson

Rowan Atkinson is well-known for playing the lovable buffoon Mr.Bean on our TV screens. It's surprising therefore to learn that the actor behind the dimwitted character is quite the opposite. Atkinson has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Newcastle University. He then went on to gain a Masters in the subject from Oxford University, one of the very top universities in the UK. Just imagine Mr. Bean attending a rather serious lecture, hehe! While at university he was part of drama and theater societies, which is where he met writer/director Richard Curtis (Mr. Bean, Love Actually, Bridget Jones's Diary). A few years after university he started collaborating with Curtis, first on the radio, and his comic career took off pretty quickly. So, the electrical engineering stuff he never used. Oh well, I guess he had something to fall back on if the acting didn't work out - that's a smart move.

11 James Franco

Actor James Franco dropped out of college when he was young to pursue a career in acting. But in 2006 he went back to UCLA and re-enrolled, proving himself to be quite the academic. For his undergraduate degree he studied English with a concentration on creative writing, for which he wrote a novel as his final thesis! How great is that! He went on to more studies at three New York schools at the same time: Columbia University's MFA writing program, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing. Juggling all of that can't have been easy so he must be a super organized guy, as well as being really smart. He doesn't have his Ph.D yet but is enrolled in the English program at Yale. So he will likely end up being Dr James Franco. Who would have thought it?

10 Emma Watson

I'd be surprised if you didn't know how amazingly smart Emma Watson is. She's always speaking eloquently and knowledgeably on various causes in the press, proving she has a lot in common with the character that made her career, Hermione Granger. While acting, she attended an Ivy League college, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island where she eventually got her Bachelor's degree in English. It took Watson, five years to complete the degree, not because she's lacking in the intelligence department but because of acting commitments meaning that she had to take a couple of semesters off during her time at Brown. In 2014, she was also appointed a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and for the role made some incredibly astute speeches on women's rights and feminism. Yass queen! She's smart and she puts her intelligence to good use.

9 Ken Jeong

So Ken Jeong is obviously known for playing a larger than life character in the Hangover trilogy. The movies might be iconic but they don't exactly represent the most intelligent, witty kind of humor. So you'd be forgiven for not realizing that Jeong is very intelligent. He's a graduate of Duke University and got his M.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. WTF! He's a doctor. Before getting into acting he did his residency in New Orleans. Jeong is still a licensed physician in California, though not a practicing one of course. It was his wife who encouraged him to leave his job as a doctor and become an actor. He's clearly a great guy to have around. He's hilarious and he can help you out in an accident.

8 Quentin Tarantino

It might come as no surprise that director Quentin Tarantino is an incredibly intelligent man. He'd have to be to make the kind of movies he's made. Despite being a high school dropout at around 15/16 years of age, Tarantino reportedly has an IQ of 160. On the IQ scale, this makes him "exceptionally gifted" - wowzers! This puts him in the league of Albert Einsten and Stephen Hawking. I knew he was smart but that's crazy. The good thing about Tarantino though is that despite his superior intelligence, he doesn't have a snobbish attitude. In an interview he once said, "I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person, lower than me. I am the audience." Good for him. He clearly owes some of his success in the movie business to his rejection of elitism.

7 Sharon Stone

You know that Sharon Stone has been in the acting biz for a long time. But did you know that Sharon Stone was a child genius? Yup, that's right. She sped through school, entering the second grade when she was just five years old and accepted a college scholarship at the age of 15 to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. How insane is that. While there she studied fine arts and creative writing. However, after winning a beauty pageant she was encouraged to quit school and move to New York City to become a model, which she did. She then transitioned from modeling to acting of course, getting her start as an extra in a Woody Allen film. Despite quitting college, Stone reportedly boasts an IQ of 154 which is of course extremely high.

6 Nolan Gould

Nolan Gould plays the dumbest kid on Modern Family. It turns out that in real life he's quite the opposite to his character Luke. You'll probably be rather surprised to find out that Gould is actually a member of Mensa. He told Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show that he has an IQ of 150, which of course puts him above genius level. Unsurprisingly then, he skipped ten grades and graduated high school at just 13, by taking a GED test. You'd think that a child star would have some trouble with schooling, having to work so much as a young kid. But this clearly is not true in Gould's case. Another way in which he shows his intelligence is as a musician. He plays the double bass, banjo, didgeridoo and mandolin. Interesting choices, don't you think.

5 Ke$ha

I know what you're thinking, Ke$ha is smarter than me? That can't be right. She has a dollar sign in her name! Well she is actually really smart. A story in Seventeen magazine back in 2010 reported that she has a genius level IQ of 140. She has also told NPR that she got a near-perfect score on her SATs back in the day. She was offered a scholarship to study Psychology at the prestigious Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia. But instead of pursuing academics she dropped out of college to become a musician and got her GED later. Her mom was a singer-songwriter and so responsible for teaching lil Ke$ha how to write songs at a young age. So it looks like in Ke$ha's case you can't judge a book by its cover. She makes simple, catchy pop songs but that doesn't stop her from being a smart lady!

4 Lisa Kudrow

Here's another actor who clearly dumbs herself down for TV. Her character on Friends, Phoebe, is so adorably ditsy and naive and it's hard to imagine Lisa Kudrow as anything but Phoebe. Buts she is truly a lot smarter than her character. Kudrow got a degree in Biology at Vassar College and her father was a scientist so she initially intended to follow in his footsteps. Can you imagine Phoebe as a scientist? Haha. Anyway, while she was breaking into the acting game Kudrow worked on her father's research staff and even earned a research credit on a study he carried out on comparative likelihood of left-handed individuals developing cluster headaches. How many actors do you know with research credits on scientific studies (apart from Natalie Portman, of course)? It's very impressive. Oh, and she also reportedly has an IQ of 154 - you know how good that is by now.

3 Kate Beckinsale

It's hard not to look at Kate Beckinsale and think about how UNBELIEVABLY stunning she is. It seems she has it all because she's got the beauty and the brains. She reportedly showed her smarts from a young age too. By the age of six she was reading at a level of 11-years, that's five years her senior! And Kate Beckinsale has the kind of intelligence that impresses a lot of people - she's a polyglot i.e. she's fluent in several languages. Many of us will know how hard it is to learn just one language, never mind mastering several. She speaks French, Russian and German, and studied French and Russian Literature at Oxford University, one of the most prestigious universities in the UK and the world. However, she quit university to pursue her evolving acting career.

2 Alicia Keys

I love Alicia Keys. I think she's just a strong and powerful woman and an amazing role model for youngsters. I think we can all agree that her songs are stunning, but we don't realize how talented of a musician Keys actually is. She started learning classical piano when she was just 7 years old and soon went on to study jazz at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan. She started writing songs at 14, was signed by Columbia Records at 15 and graduated high school at 16. Isn't that amazing? She was basically a young prodigy, talented and smart. Keys was even accepted to Comlumbia University and intended to juggle studies and her music career. But she dropped out in favor of the latter after just one month. But we can only be thankful because she's blessed us with her music.

1 Viggo Mortensen

Viggo Mortensen has obviously had much success as a critically-acclaimed actor (A History of Violence, The Lord of The Rings Trilogy) and lots of ladies think he's a heartthrob. But don't let those good looks deceive you! He's a smart guy. He's had collections of his poetry published and his artwork displayed in museums, which are both super impressive feats. But it doesn't stop there! He's a composer and talented singer (he was featured on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack). Mortensen is also a cunning linguist. He has a Bachelor's degree in Spanish, is fluent in English, Danish and Spanish. He can hold a conversation in Norwegian and can reportedly get by in French, Italian, Catalan and Swedish too. Blimey! Only a genius could be good at that many languages, surely. He truly is a man of many talents.