Unless they're lucky enough to tumble out of a Kardashian, most people aren't born celebrities. Before your favorite actors, musicians, and TV personalities got their big break, they had to work for a living just like the rest of us schlubs. And for the most part, these were not romantic careers: waiting tables, pumping gas, artisting sandwiches, taming lions ...

5 Christopher Walken Started Out as a Lion Tamer

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With one glance, you know that Christopher Walken has never had a normal life. You don't come out looking like a man-ferret and sounding like a bridge troll who received elocution lessons from the Lost in Space robot after a lifetime spent slinging horse meat at Arby's. So while it was certainly unexpected, we can't really say we were surprised to learn that Christopher Walken worked as a lion tamer in a traveling circus as a teenager.

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He was also a clown as a child. Seriously. That's him.

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Actually, he was more of a lion tamer's assistant -- not even Christopher "Makes Broadway Dance Moves Intimidating" Walken could leap, unharmed, directly into the mouth of a great cat straight out of junior high. But that doesn't mean he just did the sweeping up -- it only means that he trained one lion at a time instead of several. According to Walken, it was "more like a big dog than anything."

Think that's an understatement?

Walken found the position advertised in the help wanted section and applied simply because "I've always liked cats."

Al Barry / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty

Young Walken, pictured here with other things he "likes."

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That's like saying you jumped into the volcano because you do well with heat.

Apparently, most of the heavy lion wrangling was done by the owner of the circus, with Walken posing as his son. When the tamer was finished, he'd leave the teenage Walken alone with "Sheba" and Walken would crack his whip to make her do tricks. But as much as you'd like to envision Christopher Walken fighting a lion with nothing but a bit of fancy rope, it was all for show: In reality, Walken and Sheba were best friends. And that's ... actually way more fun to envision anyway. Get on it, screenwriters.