These Celebs Were Definitely Not Cool In School

Read on to find out which celebs weren’t part of the popular crew…

1. Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift may be one of the most famous people in the world but when she was in school, she considered herself an outcast. Back then she admits she didn’t have many friends and even penned a song on her debut album about being alone. She says those feelings followed her for a long time and even when she was sitting front row at award shows early in her career, she still didn’t “feel like a cool kid.”

“I actually put a song on the album that I wrote when I was 12, and it’s called ‘The Outside.’ It’s about what I was going through at the time. I was a complete outcast at school and never fit in, never felt like I belonged,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I was writing exactly what I saw. I was writing from pain. And I’ve always felt so lucky, because I’ve never needed an escape like drinking or drugs or anything like that to escape from the bad days. Music has always been that escape for me.”

2. Zac Efron

Zac Efron gained heartthrob status when he starred in High School Musical but his own high school experience just a few years prior wasn’t anything similar. Looking back, Zac says he was a geek who was focused on good grades and not getting into trouble.

“I wasn’t a heartthrob at school,” he told The Daily Mail. “I was a geek, I was into musical theater, which isn’t perceived as the coolest thing. There were guys who were 6’1 with beards and big muscles and I was a gawky 17-year-old, a skinny, awkward kid. I could never get into trouble like the rest of my friends; my parents were very strict and taught me good values.”

3. Jennifer Garner

Jennifer Garner says she was a band geek in middle school and definitely wasn’t hanging out with the popular crowd. While she knows she was a nerd back then, she noted that she had great friends who all thought she was cool.

“I wasn’t the popular girl in school,” she told The Independent. “I was separated by an inability to dress, and I kind of possessed a natural geekiness. I think playing the sax in a marching band at 13 was a bit of a stigma, but I wasn’t unhappy about it. All of my friends thought we were cool, and that’s all that mattered.”

4. Selena Gomez

While Selena Gomez spent a lot of her adolescence being homeschooled, she says that when she did attend regular school, she was a nerd. She joked that if it hadn’t been for her popular cousin, she probably would have been bullied.

“If my cousin wasn’t the captain of the cheerleading team, I would have been destroyed … Because I was just, you know, I was kind of a nerd and just hung out with like, one person,” she said on the Giving Back Generation podcast.

5. Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga hasn’t been shy in sharing how she was treated by her classmates growing up. She says the other girls frequently teased her for her interest in music and often excluded her from activities. A group of students even created a Facebook group called “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.”

“Being teased for being ugly, having a big nose, being annoying,” she listed off to Rolling Stone. “‘Your laugh is funny, you’re weird, why do you always sing, why are you so into theater, why do you do your make-up like that?’ … I used to be called a s–t, be called this, be called that, I didn’t even want to go to school sometimes.”

6. Jessica Alba

Jessica Alba didn’t fit in with the cool crowd when she was in school. In fact, Jessica says she was bullied for being different from the other girls and not having the right clothes and accessories to fit in. Her classmates were so mean to her, that her dad actually had to walk her to school.

“I was the sort of girl who other kids wanted to avoid. I was this incredibly shy, awkward child with buck teeth and a thick Texas accent. I hardly ever spoke up because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself,” she told Daily Mail.

She continued, “My dad had to walk me there so I didn’t get attacked. I’d eat my lunch in the nurses’ office so I didn’t have to sit with the other girls. I’d get beaten up and picked on all the time. It was about being different and not fitting in. Apart from my being mixed race, my parents didn’t have money so I never had the cute clothes or the cool backpack.”

7. Adam Levine

Adam Levine may be the frontman of Maroon 5 but he says back then it wasn’t very cool to be in a band. Looking back, he says he definitely didn’t dress well and it was a long time before he attracted attention from girls.

“When I was 14, 15, I think it was a little less cool to be in a band,” he told Access Hollywood. “I was very uncool, had disgusting long hair and shorts down to [to my knees], cut off shorts — I desperately wanted to be Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam really badly, and I was just a nerdy, awkward kid and I was obsessed with music.”

8. Anna Kendrick

Looking back on her high school days, Anna Kendrick has called herself a “flat chested theater nerd.”

While discussing her experience on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Anna shared that she had a fairly “normal high school experience” but “wasn’t, like, socially comfortable, that’s for sure.”

9. Liam Hemsworth

Liam Hemsworth may be a heartthrob now, but he says growing up in Australia, he was pretty awkward and definitely not hanging out with the cool crowd. He says he often got stuck wearing his brothers’ old clothing and had terrible hair.

“I used to wear my brothers’ hand-me-downs, which were all too big on me. I used to have an afro — like Will Ferrell in Semi-Pro. It was bleached blonde from the sun. I was tall and awkward. I was not cool,” Liam told Men’s Health.

10. Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron looks stunning when she hits the red carpet now but in high school she says she looked like a geek. Reflecting on her school days, she says she had massive glasses and was teased from the age of seven to 12.

“I wore really nerdy glasses because I was blind as could be and the boys didn’t like [me]. I didn’t have any boyfriends, but lots of crushes…I wasn’t in the popular crowd,” she told People. “I actually got a lot of the mean girl stuff from the ages of seven to 12. I was pretty much a mess in primary school. But I got that out of my system by the time I got to high school and was more immune to all of that stuff.”

11. Alison Brie

Alison Brie says she considered herself a nerd in high school but it didn’t really bother her. She spent her time focused on the drama department and had plenty of friends who were also interested in theater. While she wasn’t in the cool crowd, she still had fun.

“I was fairly nerdy in high school — not that bad. I had drama friends! I was a drama nerd,” she told The Daily Beast. I was kind of nerdy and by senior year was President of the Drama Club, and because I was in drama, I had to have good grades so I could do the plays. And because of drama, I really liked high school! I had fun.”