"There's a great saying from the 12-step program: 'Don't give up five minutes before the miracle,' " said Josh Peck, the star of "Drake & Josh" recently said in an interview with MTV.com. "It's just so easy to become discouraged and disillusioned. Too many people give up on their dreams too soon. There is honor in everything that anyone does, as long as you put your heart into it. We're at the age where we should be striving for the best, and just see what happens from there. But at least you went for it." Josh is among a dozen actors who reveal that they were common shlebs before they were stars:
Eva Longoria was a cashier at Wendy's; Ray Romano worked as a truck washer; and Paul Walker was too successful of a panhandler at Magic Mountain to get a real job. But hey, who wouldn't give money to that hottie?
"I was still working at a video store," said director Quentin Tarantino. "After staying up all night long [I was thinking], 'I've gotta quit the store, I've gotta move out of this area, I've gotta move to Hollywood, I can't get lost in another job.' I was up all night thinking about it [until] nine in the morning, and I called up a friend of mine to have breakfast so I could tell him all the stuff that I'd decided to do over the night, so I couldn't take it back."
"My Jeep got stolen the first day — the first hour — I was in L.A.," said "Van Wilder" star Ryan Reynolds. "I parked it outside the scumbag hotel I was staying at and found it a block down, stripped.
"Every job I had before this one sucked," said Zach Braff, the star of Scrubs. "Working as a production assistant on music videos [like] Mariah Carey's 'The Roof' — I did that. And by 'did that,' I mean that I lugged chairs for that."
Read what other actors were doing before fame came calling at MTV.com
