38 Celebs Who Built Successful Hollywood Careers Without Industry Connections Or Family Money
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It’s harder for aspiring creatives from humble beginnings to “make it” in an industry chock-full of nepo babies and rich kids. However, plenty of celebs have truly built their careers brick by brick without the help of family money or connections.
Here are 38 celebs who are entirely self-made:
1.
Viola Davis spent her childhood “in abject poverty and dysfunction” and lived in “rat-infested and condemned” apartments. When she was 2, she was taken to jail with her mother, a civil rights activist, who was arrested during a protest. She studied acting at Young People’s School for the Performing Arts, Rhode Island College, and Juilliard.
2.
Selena Gomez’s mom, Mandy Teefey, who was 16 when she had her, “gave up everything for [her] and had like three jobs.” The two of them would dig through the car to find quarters to pay for gas. As a kid, Selena also accompanied Mandy to her play rehearsals, which inspired her to be an actor. She made her onscreen debut in Barney & Friends at 7, then booked her first Disney Channel pilot at 12.
3.
When Addison Rae was 7, her family moved into a camper on a lot her dad’s employers owned because they “didn’t have anywhere to live.” A few years later, they moved to a new state, where she was bullied for wearing off-brand shoes. Speaking with her mom on her That Was Fun? podcast, she said, “My mom, being the sweet mom that you are, was like, ‘We’re gonna buy you Uggs so that people aren’t mean to you anymore.’ She literally [took] me to buy Uggs that day. I remember we went to the mall… They were, like, $200 Uggs, which was not cheap for us.”
Growing up, Addison felt that becoming an actor was an unattainable dream, so in college, she studied journalism so that she could still be on TV. She told Elle, “Then I got super lucky with TikTok, and was so blessed with the chance to move to LA.”
4.
Eva Longoria told BuzzFeed News, “We didn’t have any money growing up. I grew up at the Boys & Girls Club. I grew up at the Salvation Army, folding coats for their winter. I grew up at soup kitchens every Thanksgiving. That was just the way it was. My family is a very selfless family because we benefited so much from all these community programs that my mom was like, ‘We have to give back.’ And the only way we could do that was by volunteering. We pay it forward.”
5.
Cardi B told Global Grind, “I have real good parents; they [are] poor. They have regular, poor jobs and whatnot. They [are] real good people and whatnot; I was just raised in a bad society.”
Before her rise from social media personality to reality star to A-list rapper, Cardi worked as a stripper to make ends meet. She told Vibe, “I’m not gonna lie, and I’m not gonna ever hate on the game, but it paid my bills. It also lifted my spirits when I needed some lifting. Yes, went through a lot of sh’t. But I made a lot of money doing it, and there were times when being at the strip club was better than the alternative… When I got kicked out of my mom’s house, I had to live in my boyfriend’s house. I wanted to come here, to my family’s house, but my dad was so mad at me. And he was like, ‘Don’t you even think that you’re going to go to your grandma’s house. You’re not staying there.’ He told me that, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, I’m not going over there.'”
She continued, “I was going to sleep hungry. I was crying a lot. There were days where I couldn’t wait to go to work, at the supermarket I worked at before stripping… I couldn’t wait to go to work so I could eat. It’s sad to feel that way. And I wanted to move out of [my boyfriend’s house]. There was two pit bulls in that house, and I had asthma. I was dying in there. There was bedbugs, too. There was always guys going in and out, his homeboys playing PlayStation, stealing money from us. I wanted to move out so bad. And then on top of that, I felt like my ex-boyfriend was cheating on me, but it was like even if he was cheating on me, I still can’t leave because — where was I gonna go? … I was working at the supermarket for about $200 a week. I was not going to go nowhere on that. I wasn’t gonna go anywhere. So, I started dancing and made enough money to move out of that house. And I’ve never looked back.”
6.
When Leighton Meester was born, both of her parents were in prison for their involvement in a drug smuggling ring. Before giving birth, her mom moved into a halfway house, then delivered her in a hospital. After three months, Leighton was sent to live with her grandma until her mom finished her sentence. Her parents divorced when she was 6. A few years later, she started acting at a local playhouse in Florida, then her mom got her an agent and moved the family to New York. When Leighton was in high school, her family relocated to Los Angeles, where they lived in “the slums.” She began booking TV and movie roles.
7.
Though The Kissing Booth made Jacob Elordi an overnight celebrity, he struggled to book more roles afterward and ended up living in his car. While filming the Euphoria pilot, a producer, who found out about his living situation, helped him get a hotel room to stay in. He told GQ, “I think I had – I don’t know, $400 or $800 left in my bank account – and Euphoria was my last audition before I went home for a little while to make some money and recuperate.”
8.
When Zendaya decided she wanted to be an actor, her mom stayed in Oakland and worked two jobs to support the family, while her dad quit his job and moved to LA with her. However, as Zendaya grew more successful, she became the family breadwinner. In 2024, she told British Vogue, “I’m almost going through my angsty teenager phase now because I didn’t really have the time to do it before. I felt like I was thrust into a very adult position: I was becoming the breadwinner of my family very early, and there was a lot of role-reversal happening, and just kind of becoming grown, really.”
“Now, when I have these moments in my career — like, my first time leading a film that’s actually going to be in a theater — I feel like I shrink, and I can’t enjoy all the things that are happening to me, because I’m like this [she balls up her fist]. I’m very tense, and I think that I carry that from being a kid and never really having an opportunity to just try shit. And I wish I went to school,” she said.
9.
Growing up in San Francisco, Emma Chamberlain was always “the one who struggled financially.” Her dad is an artist, and “he got sick for a little bit and couldn’t paint, so there was hard times for [their] family.” For Emma, watching YouTube videos was a source of escapism. Inspired to start her own channel, she taught herself to edit and began uploading DIY videos. However, she found more success after she shifted her focus to videos that felt more authentic to her. She told Forbes, “Having no money at certain points was weird…so now it’s so cool that I can make my own money and do whatever I want with it.”
10.
Born to parents who were only 18 and 20, Tobey Maguire bounced around different relatives’ homes as a kid. He told Parade magazine, “The truth of the matter is, I realized at a young age that I was responsible for myself. … Growing up the way I did, I had a very serious ambition to make some money, to have some security and comfort in my life.”
He also said, “I feel like you could drop me anywhere in the world, anonymously, and I’d figure out how to survive. If you stripped away everything I’ve got — the money, the fame, the possessions, everything — I know that I’d find a way to get along because basically, that’s what I’ve had to do all my life.”
11.
When Jenna Ortega was growing up, her mom wasn’t sure about putting her in acting, but after she posted a video of her 9-year-old daughter performing a monologue on Facebook “as a joke,” a casting agent reached out. She let her start auditioning, but Jenna “was constantly shut down because [she] did not have the look they were going for.” Jenna told PopSugar, “All of the nos I received just motivated me even more. I wanted to change the casting directors’ point of view. I wanted to get rid of that description. That’s what I did.”
Her mom continued to be incredibly supportive. Jenna told Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “Four or five times a week — my mom is a full-time ER nurse, but she would drive me. It was like a six, seven-hour round trip — LA and back — for auditions. And she has five other kids!”
12.
Misha Collins’s family “was so poor when [he] was growing up [they] were homeless at times.” At one point, they lived in a tent in the woods, used a galvanized tub filled with cool water as a fridge, and cooked over a campfire. He didn’t start acting until his 20s, first earning his degree in social theory from the University of Chicago and even interning at the White House.
13.
When Halle Berry first moved to New York City to pursue acting, she ran out of money within three months and temporarily lived in a homeless shelter. She told The Jess Cagle Interview, “I called my mother and asked her to send me some money, and she said no, and that subsequently led to a year of not speaking to her because I was so upset that she wouldn’t help me. That’s probably one of the best things she did for me. … She said, ‘If you want to be there, then you work it out.’ And I had to work it out. … And shelter life was part of figuring it out for a minute until I could get a waitressing job. Then I got a bartending job, and until I could figure that out, that’s what I did.”
14.
When Bella Thorne was a preteen, she didn’t want to be a Disney star, but she accepted the lead in Shake It Up because her family was “about to live physically on the street if [she] didn’t have that role.” She told the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “We were living off Stouffer’s coupons, and that’s all we had to eat every day. That may not sound like a big deal to everybody, but when you’re a single mom raising four kids with debt and you have nothing to your name, it’s fucking shitty.”
After her time on Disney Channel came to a close, she struggled to book more work because casting directors pigeonholed her as a “Disney actress.” She said, “It was like starting back at the bottom and working my way up all the way again.”
15.
Shania Twain grew up as one of five kids, and she sometimes went to school hungry. She told Nightline, “It’s very hard to concentrate when your stomach’s rumbling… I would certainly never have humiliated myself enough to reach out and ask for help and say, ‘You know, I’m hungry. Can I have that apple that you’re not going to eat?’ I didn’t have the courage to do that.”
16.
Cameron Diaz told Stella magazine, “I had amazing parents; they were awesome. We weren’t privileged — very much the opposite. My family would collect cans to turn in for extra money, because $20 meant something to us. But we were very happy… I come from a frugal upbringing, so I’m not just going to throw my money away. I love to be close to my family and friends, so I spend money on plane tickets, having feasts, buying a ton of groceries and cooking, or going out for an amazing meal, knowing I don’t worry about how much the bill costs.”
17.
Jessica Chastain told the Irish Times, “I did grow up with a single mother who worked very hard to put food on our table. We did not have money. There were many nights when we had to go to sleep without eating. It was a very difficult upbringing. Things weren’t easy for me growing up. … Because of my mother, I do always try to think about how something must be for someone else. I’m not so interested in myself. I’m interested in other people.”
18.
After losing his mother at 12, Barry Keoghan and his brother lived in 13 different foster homes over five years until his grandmother was able to raise them. As a kid, he snuck into the movie theater with his friends so often that he got banned, but when he grew up, one of his movies premiered in that very theater.
With his brother’s unwavering support, he decided to pursue acting after seeing a casting call for Between the Canal, a crime drama, in a store window. Afterward, he started studying at a local workshop. He told the Guardian, “I was looking for something. I was looking to mess around, to joke. And get paid! But on a deeper level, it was very therapeutic for me. I could be someone else. I think you get to release a few of your problems there through being another person.”
19.
When Bretman Rock was 7, they immigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii with their siblings and mom, who worked several jobs to support the family. In middle school, Bretman “didn’t want to tell [their] teacher” that they couldn’t afford to bring in ingredients for a cooking class, so they failed. On the first episode of MTV’s Following: Bretman Rock, they said, “It taught me so many lessons about having nothing and only having dreams — that’s all we could afford.”
As a teenager, he used social media as a creative outlet. His friends encouraged him to upload his Snapchat stories to Instagram, and after he made his account public, his videos began going viral. His follower count grew to millions while he was still in high school. He told Teen Vogue, “I really don’t think there’s anything in my life right now or any accomplishments that I have that I didn’t manifest.”
20.
Jessica Alba told Glamour UK, “I grew up in survival mode. It was almost sort of what I was born into. My parents didn’t have a safety net; they were living paycheck to paycheck. And so the mentality of ‘tomorrow’s not guaranteed’… For me, I was like, ‘I got to do everything I can to keep my head above water.’ … I think because no one had any expectations that I would be successful, how could you fail? I wasn’t set up — no one was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re going to be…’ They were just like, ‘Here’s your life.’ And I was like, ‘This is some bullshit. I want a better life than that. I don’t want to be in survival mode all the time.'”
21.
At the start of her career, Stevie Nicks supported herself and her then-boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham, by cleaning houses and waiting tables after her parents financially cut her off following her decision to drop out of college and pursue music. She told CBS Sunday Morning, “I was doing that to support my music, my music pal, Lindsey, and some other friends, too, you know, that didn’t have hardly anything. So, I was the one who actually was able to pay the rent and pay the money to keep our Toyota running. And so it’s like, I didn’t mind at all because I did not expect my boyfriend, Lindsey, to get a job. Because what in the world would he do?”
22.
Tiffany Haddish entered foster care at 13. Two years later, she and her siblings were put in their grandparents’ custody, but they stayed in the system because the subsidies helped the family’s financial situation. After striking out on her own, she experienced homelessness three times. She told GQ, “I think that was God teaching me a lesson over and over. I wasn’t paying attention the first two times.”
23.
When Hilary Swank was 6, her family moved into a trailer park. Nine years later, her parents separated, and she and her mother relocated to LA, where they lived in their car until they could afford an apartment. She told Together magazine, “For me, when people say, ‘Wow, you grew up in a trailer.’ But it didn’t feel like that. I didn’t feel, ‘Oh, poor me, I’m in a trailer park.’ It wasn’t a bad experience. I had a roof over my head and I had food, and so it wasn’t that being poor and having those experiences was a negative.”
“The negative part of it was learning about class at such a young age, not from my friends, but from my friends’ parents, who would say, ‘You aren’t to hang out with her.’ At 6 years old, to have a parent say, ‘You’re not welcome in our home, you need to go.’ Or, ‘You can’t play with my son or daughter.’ Now I see children, I just think, How could anyone do something like that?” she said.
She dropped out of high school because she “felt like such an outsider” and “didn’t even feel like the teachers wanted [her] there.” However, she found a sense of belonging in acting.
24.
According to Beatles biographer Bob Spitz, Ringo Starr grew up in poverty and didn’t get much education. He described Ringo’s upbringing as “Dickensian.” Per Britannica, his parents divorced when he was very young. When he turned 6, he spent a year in the hospital after his appendix burst. Then, when he was 13, he spent another two years at a sanatorium because of pleurisy. After being discharged, he didn’t return to school, but a healthcare worker had already introduced him to something that would change his life — the drums.
25.
Dave Grohl grew up in an impoverished, single-parent family in Virginia. He told the Guardian, “I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven… I remember the first check I got [from Nirvana] totally validated me in my father’s eyes. And my dad was like, ‘Don’t mess this up, treat every check as if it’s the last one you’re ever gonna make. Because there’s no way this is gonna last.’ And I was like, I know. This will never last.”
26.
When Camila Cabello was 7, she and her mom immigrated from Cuba to the US. Her mom had been an architect but worked at Marshall’s because her credentials didn’t transfer. They lived in a house that belonged to Camila’s grandpa’s colleague. Through two Cuban customers she met at Marshall’s, Camila’s mom found an architecture job. Camila told PopSugar, “She learned how to use the program in a week and made enough to move us out of my godmother’s house and into an apartment… [Then] my papá came over from Mexico a year and a half later… He started off washing cars in front of Dolphin Mall in the blistering Miami heat. But we kept moving on up.”
Eventually, her parents started a construction company and named it after their daughters. Then, when she was in ninth grade, she convinced them to drive her to North Carolina to audition for The X Factor, which led to her spot in Fifth Harmony.
27.
While working as a child actor, Sarah Michelle Gellar attended a private school in Manhattan on a scholarship that covered half of her expenses. She told the Independent, “I was different, and that’s the one thing you can’t be at school, because you’re ostracized. I didn’t have the money these kids had. I can remember this kid having an engraved Tiffany money clip when I barely had enough money for my bus pass. It was amazing to see what excessive wealth at an early age and lack of parental supervision breeds.”
28.
After The Kid LAROI’s parents divorced, he and his mom struggled financially, and she sold drugs to make ends meet. They eventually moved into project housing in Sydney, but after being kicked out due to noise complaints, they couch-surfed. He started making music by recording on his mom’s phone. After upgrading to a studio, he uploaded his songs on Soundcloud and then grew an international fanbase. In 2019, Grade A Productions executive Lil Bibby took notice and signed him to a joint deal with Columbia Records.
29.
In her memoir Sorry Not Sorry, Naya Rivera said that, growing up, her family often faced financial issues because of her dad’s spending habits. After losing his IT job in 2001, he couldn’t find work for three years. She wrote, “As Dad’s stint of unemployment dragged on, I became the only one in the family who had any money…I didn’t have millions — more like tens of thousands — in my Coogan account, but these were dire times. There was literally no money coming in at all, so over the next few years, my mom and I made two court visits to request a withdrawal from my account. I’d miss the first few hours of class, and we’d go to court and stand in front of a judge to petition for permission.”
She continued, “Your honor,’ my mom would say, ‘this is my daughter and she has X amount of money in an account that I protect, but recently our family has fallen on hard times. We would like to withdraw $2,000 from the account to cover us for the next month. My husband is currently looking for work, and I have two other children to take care of.’ The judge would listen, and then ask me if I was okay with the idea. I always said yes.”
Withdrawing from her Coogan account wasn’t the only way Naya provided for her family. She said, “Because I’d been a working actor, I was also eligible to receive unemployment though I was still a minor. This brought in another $700 every two weeks, in checks made out to me that my parents cashed, so for about three years, from the time I was 15 until I was a senior in high school, I was almost always financially helping my family in some way…I felt like it wasn’t just my career riding on every audition, but potentially the roof over my family’s head.”
30.
Mila Kunis was 7 when she and her parents moved from Ukraine to the US. She told Cover magazine, “We came to this country with literally nothing, and so any level of success is important to us. They never wanted me to become an actress because it’s such an unstable and unpredictable profession. When you’re immigrants, and you have to work hard for everything just to survive, it’s only natural that you worry about having a stable job and income. But I think now they’re more or less convinced that I’m doing pretty well, and they don’t have to worry about my career prospects anymore.”
31.
Sarah Jessica Parker, who grew up with seven siblings, told the New York Times, “We were on welfare. I knew I was different from the kids who pay for lunch or bring their lunch from home. It was a stigma thing. I was not the only person receiving a free lunch, but you are aware. I remember my childhood as Dickensian. I remember being poor. There was no great way to hide it. We didn’t have electricity sometimes. We didn’t have Christmases sometimes, or we didn’t have birthdays sometimes, or the bill collectors came, or the phone company would call and say, ‘We’re shutting your phones off.’ And we were all old enough to either get the calls or watch my mother’s reactions or watch my parents shuffling the money around.”
She also said, “That is why I have such a weird relationship with money. And it is why I can be profligate and super frugal. And I think it is rather warped, since it comes from this desire to save, save, save.”
32.
Iman Vellani’s family moved from Pakistan to Canada when she was a baby. Her parents, “being immigrants, wanted [their kids] to try new things.” With their support, she submitted her first audition tape for Ms. Marvel. On the last day of senior year, she got the part. She told the Hollywood Reporter, “[Her parents] would never be the ones to be like, ‘Just focus on your studies,’ because you can do that anywhere. They brought their kids to a different country so they could have different opportunities.”
33.
In a since-deleted Tumblr audio clip from a few years ago, Cole Sprouse reportedly said, “My brother [Dylan] and I were put into acting when we were 8 months old by our mother because we needed money. I never made the decision to join the arts or acting specifically. And so it was never really my passion.”
Then, during a 2023 appearance on Call Her Daddy, he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this… When my father was given forced custody, we had pretty much lost everything from the youngest parts of our career. That would be Friends and Big Daddy. My mother was an incredibly wonderful and artistic woman, but she was financially the most irresponsible woman ever.” He also said that, while their dad initially wanted them to be “normal kids” after the divorce, he ultimately decided keeping Dylan and Cole in acting was necessary to take care of the family financially.
34.
After winning the talent show New Faces as a teenager, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power actor Lenny Henry became “the family breadwinner” overnight. In 2012, he told Yorkshire Live, “Which you don’t really want to be when you’re just 17, but I took it on because I love my family. I could buy them a new fridge and pay for the house to be redecorated.”
35.
The daughter of two teachers, Annie Murphy found a passion for acting in high school and studied theater in university. She had a few minor TV roles and a leading role on a web series in Canada before moving to LA. However, after not booking any roles for two years, her house burned down, she was down to $400, and she’d “absolutely shat the bed” at her first screen test. Two days later, however, she was called in to audition for Schitt’s Creek. She told Fashion magazine, “I realized that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel; you just don’t quite know when you’ll be bathed in it.”
36.
As kids, Jennifer Lopez and her two sisters all shared a room. When she was 18, she moved out and started sleeping in the office of her dance studio because her mom didn’t approve of her choosing a dance career over college. However, eventually, the success she found as a dancer helped her break into acting and music as well. Her biggest dancing gig was a Fly Girl on In Living Color. Her fellow dancer’s husband was a producer, and he saw Jennifer talking during a behind-the-scenes segment and decided she was the perfect fit for a pilot he was writing.
37.
By first grade, Jodie Foster — the youngest in her family — was the main breadwinner for her mom and three siblings. In 2024, she told the Atlantic, “I was it. There was no other income besides me.”
38.
And finally, Tyler Perry is now a billionaire, but he grew up in an impoverished family in New Orleans, and he was unhoused for a time. He told Forbes, “I love when people say you come from ‘humble beginnings.’ [It] means you were poor as hell.”
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