35 Celebrity Friendships That Started Long Before Anyone Was Famous

I’ve always loved when celebrities have friendships that go back way before any of them made it, there’s something about it that feels more real than the usual red carpet small talk. It means the friendship wasn’t built because of fame, fame just happened to show up later and change things a little.

These are the friends who knew someone back when they were broke, working a normal job, auditioning for parts nobody remembers. That kind of loyalty is rare once money and attention get involved, so when it survives all of that, it says something real about the people involved.

These celeb friendships go back further than most people realize, long before any of them were famous at all.

1. Sarah Paulson And Pedro Pascal

Back in 1993, Sarah Paulson was handing over her per diem so Pedro Pascal could afford to eat. Actual grocery money, from her paycheck to his pocket, so he could feed himself while he tried to get his acting career off the ground. Paulson had an established friend group in New York and took the struggling young Pascal under their wing when he had nothing.

Fast forward thirty years and he’s the Mandalorian, one of the most in-demand actors on the planet. The two have stayed close through all of it, which says something about both of them.

2. Kate Hudson And Liv Tyler

Kate Hudson and Liv Tyler grew up moving in the same circles as teenagers in the 1990s, both navigating the particular strangeness of being famous people’s kids before becoming famous themselves.

Hudson was Goldie Hawn’s daughter, Tyler was Steven Tyler’s daughter, which put them both in that odd in-between world of celebrity children who are recognized but not yet known for anything they’ve actually done themselves.

3. Justin Timberlake And Ryan Gosling

Same Mickey Mouse Club cast as Britney and Christina, Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling became close enough that Gosling’s mother let Timberlake’s mother become Ryan’s legal guardian so the two boys could live together while filming. Gosling had moved from Canada alone and needed somewhere to stay. Timberlake’s family took him in.

Two kids, one from Memphis and one from a small town in Ontario, sharing a home in Orlando while they learned to sing and dance for a children’s TV show. One would go on to sell out arenas, the other would win awards for playing a jazz pianist in a movie about following your dreams. In 1993 they were just two boys sharing a bedroom.

4. Scarlett Johansson And Jack Antonoff

Scarlett Johansson and Jack Antonoff both attended the Professional Children’s School in New York City, a school designed specifically for young people already working in the entertainment industry. It’s the kind of place where your classmates are child actors and teenage musicians instead of regular kids, and where nobody thinks twice about you missing school for an audition.

Johansson was already doing films, Antonoff was playing guitar and figuring out what kind of musician he wanted to be. They went to prom together before either had any real profile to speak of. Antonoff would go on to become one of the most in-demand producers in pop music, working with Taylor Swift, Lorde and Lana Del Rey among others. Not a bad person to have taken to prom.

5. Nicole Richie And Kim Kardashian

Reality television’s biggest names go back much further than most people realize, meeting as preteens in Malibu long before cameras followed either of them anywhere.

Kardashian has openly admitted they used to shoplift makeup together from a local store, which is about as far from their current brand partnerships and luxury lifestyles as you can get. Two wealthy kids from famous families, bored enough to pocket mascara for the thrill of it.

6. Robert Downey Jr. And Kiefer Sutherland

Before one became Iron Man and the other became Jack Bauer, Robert Downey Jr. and Kiefer Sutherland were broke, young actors sharing an apartment in Los Angeles. Both were trying to crack Hollywood in the early 1980s, riding the same wave of young talent that would define the Brat Pack era.

Two kids from famous Hollywood families (Downey’s father was a filmmaker, Sutherland’s was Donald Sutherland) trying to step out of their fathers’ shadows at exactly the same moment. They managed it, just took a few years and a shared rent bill first.

7. Leonardo Dicaprio And Tobey Maguire

Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire have been best friends since they were teenagers auditioning for the same roles in early 1990s Hollywood. Just two kids from broken homes, grinding through auditions together before either had a real credit to their name. DiCaprio was raised by a single mother in East LA, Maguire by parents who divorced when he was two.

They were so close that when DiCaprio started booking bigger roles, he’d reportedly lobby casting directors to consider Maguire too. Spider-Man and Jack Dawson, looking out for each other before either had any clout to throw around.

8. Andy Samberg And Chelsea Peretti

Chelsea Peretti and Andy Samberg grew up together in the Bay Area, which is the kind of thing that sounds made up until you realize the writers of Brooklyn Nine-Nine actually wrote it into the show. Their characters share a childhood connection on screen, a quiet nod to the real history between the two actors.

Samberg is better known for his early friendships with the Lonely Island guys, the creative partnership that eventually got him onto Saturday Night Live, but Peretti was in the picture long before any of that. Years later they’d end up on the same hit television show, playing colleagues who’d known each other forever. Which, in a way, they had.

9. Kate Hudson And Liv Tyler

Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were both mouseketeer kids on the Mickey Mouse Club in the early 1990s, a cast that also included Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling. Two little girls from the South grinding through choreography and vocal rehearsals together before either had any idea they’d both become the biggest pop stars of their generation.

When they both exploded onto the charts in 1999 with debut singles released within months of each other, the media immediately turned them into rivals. But they’d been in the same room, doing the same work, long before any of that. The rivalry was a music industry narrative. The shared history was real.

10. Nicole Kidman And Naomi Watts

This pair of Australia’s most successful exports met as teenagers at the same high school and theater company in Sydney, long before Hollywood had any idea either of them existed.

It wasn’t until they starred together in the 1991 film Flirting that the friendship really clicked into place. Both would leave Australia for Hollywood around the same time, too. There’s something that bonds people who make the same terrifying leap together, and Kidman and Watts have been close ever since, two girls from Sydney who both ended up with Academy Award nominations.

11. Ben Affleck And Matt Damon

They grew up two blocks apart in Cambridge, Massachusetts, met when they were eight and ten years old, and ended up winning an Academy Award together. Not a bad return on a childhood friendship.

Affleck and Damon spent their teenage years doing what most aspiring actors do, grinding through auditions and small parts, except they were doing it together and occasionally writing their own material on the side. That side project turned into Good Will Hunting, a script they’d been working on for years and shopped around Hollywood before anyone bit.

12. Judd Apatow And Adam Sandler

Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler were broke roommates in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, two young guys from New York trying to crack the comedy world from a shared apartment.

Sandler was doing stand-up at clubs, Apatow was trying to write his way into the industry, and neither had any money or any real traction yet. Sandler got there first, landing on Saturday Night Live in 1990 while Apatow kept grinding. Twenty years later, Apatow directed Sandler in Funny People, a semi-autobiographical film about a famous comedian facing his own mortality.

13. Brooke Shields And Laura Linney

Two of Hollywood’s most enduring actresses were classmates together at the Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey before either had any serious career to speak of.

Shields was already a controversial figure by then, having done Calvin Klein ads and Pretty Baby as a child, while Linney was quietly working toward what would become one of the most respected acting careers of her generation. They moved in the same circles through their New Jersey school days before both ended up at Ivy League universities, Shields at Princeton and Linney at Brown.

14. Amy Poehler & Tina Fey

Before Weekend Update, before Mean Girls, before Baby Mama, before hosting the Golden Globes and making it look effortless, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were just two young women doing improv at the ImprovOlympic theater in Chicago.

That’s where it started, in the mid-1980s experimental comedy scene that was producing some of the sharpest comedic talent in the country. Both ended up at Saturday Night Live, where their chemistry translated immediately to a wider audience. The collaborations kept coming after that.

15. Demi Lovato And Selena Gomez

Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez met as seven-year-olds on the set of Barney and Friends, where they played best friends on screen before becoming best friends in real life. Both were Texas kids navigating the strange world of child acting, doing the purple dinosaur circuit while their peers were playing Little League.

They grew up together through the Disney machine, each getting their own shows and movie deals around the same time. For a while, they were Hollywood’s most visible best friend duo. The friendship eventually faded as their lives and struggles took them in different directions, but for a stretch, they were inseparable.

16. Danny DeVito And Micheal Douglas

Danny DeVito and Michael Douglas met on a beach in 1967. Two young men with serious Hollywood ambitions crossing paths in the most casual setting possible, hitting it off immediately, and then spending the next several decades proving the friendship had legs.

By 1975 Douglas was producing One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and found a role in it for DeVito, which is the kind of thing you do for someone you actually like. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Not a bad return on a beach conversation from eight years earlier.

17. John Mulaney And Nick Kroll

John Mulaney and Nick Kroll were doing improv together at Georgetown University before either had any idea it would turn into actual careers. Two college kids finding their comedic voices in the same theater program, which in hindsight looks like an obvious origin story but at the time was just two guys trying to make their classmates laugh.

Kroll came from serious money while Mulaney was a Chicago kid with a Catholic school background and a gift for observational storytelling. Unlikely pairing on paper, but comedy has a way of cutting through that. They eventually ended up collaborating on Big Mouth, an animated show about the horrors of puberty that became one of Netflix’s most beloved comedies.

18. Courtney Love And Drew Barrymore

Courtney Love was 19 and sneaking a cigarette in a bathroom when an 8-year-old Drew Barrymore walked in and joined her. That’s how they met, which tells you everything you need to know about both of them.

Barrymore was already notorious by then, the former child star who’d been drinking since she was nine and would hit rehab before most kids hit middle school. Love was just getting started on what would become one of rock’s most spectacularly chaotic careers. Somehow it made perfect sense that they found each other in a bathroom, underage and already operating by their own rules.

19. Nicole Richie And Paris Hilton

Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton grew up together in Beverly Hills, bonding as kids in the kind of rarefied social circle where your dad is Lionel Richie and your friend’s family owns a hotel chain. They went to school together, ran in the same circles through their teens, and were fixtures at the same parties long before reality TV existed.

When The Simple Life came along in 2003, it looked like a manufactured celebrity pairing, but these two had actually been in each other’s lives for years. Rich kids playing at being poor on a farm made for great television, but the underlying friendship was real, even if it did implode spectacularly a few years later.

20. Wes Anderson And Owen Wilson

Wes Anderson wrote Owen Wilson’s Edgar Allan Poe paper in exchange for the better bedroom in their University of Texas apartment. That’s the foundation on which one of American cinema’s most celebrated creative partnerships was built.

While they were sorting out who got which room, they were also co-writing Bottle Rocket, which would become Anderson’s directorial debut and launch both of their careers simultaneously. Wilson brought the script to his brother Luke, Anderson brought his already fully-formed visual obsessions, and somehow the whole thing worked well enough to get them out of Texas and into Hollywood.

21. Prince William And Eddie Redmayne

Eddie Redmayne and the future King of England played rugby together at Eton, which is a sentence that works perfectly well as its own argument for why British boarding schools produce such strange social dynamics.

Redmayne has been gracious about the experience, noting that he felt sorry for William because every opposing player on the field had an obvious target. Nobody wants to miss the chance to legally tackle royalty, which meant the future king absorbed considerably more punishment than his position probably warranted.

22. Lisa Kudrow And Conan O’Brien

Conan O’Brien accidentally saved Lisa Kudrow’s career by throwing an imaginary ball. She was ready to quit improv entirely, too embarrassed to keep showing up, when she watched O’Brien commit so completely to a simple exercise that it reframed everything she thought she understood about performance.

The influence went both ways as Kudrow reportedly encouraged O’Brien to pursue talk show hosting, which turned out to be reasonable advice. They also dated briefly before concluding they were better as friends.

23. Debi Mazar And Madonna

New York City in the early 1980s was the kind of place where you could meet someone in a nightclub elevator and end up friends for forty years. That’s exactly what happened when a young makeup artist named Debi Mazar crossed paths with a then-unknown Madonna and got hired to do her makeup.

Mazar was already embedded in the downtown New York scene, the clubs and the art world and the general beautiful chaos of early 80s Manhattan. Madonna was about to become one of the most famous people on the planet, but neither of them knew that yet. The friendship outlasted the professional relationship by decades, surviving Madonna’s transformation from downtown club kid to global superpower, which is no small thing.

24. Ashley Tisdale And Vanessa Hudgens

A Sears commercial in 2005 is not where you’d expect one of Disney’s most recognizable friendships to begin, but that’s where Tisdale and Hudgens first crossed paths, a year before either of them knew they’d end up playing rivals in High School Musical.

When casting brought them back together for the film, they already had a head start on everyone else, which probably made playing frenemies on screen considerably easier when you’re actually friends off it. Both were young actresses doing the commercial circuit, the unglamorous side of the industry that most people don’t see, before Disney handed them one of the biggest youth franchises of the 2000s.

25. Mick Foley And Kevin James

Before Kevin James was bumbling through mall security in Paul Blart and before Mick Foley was getting thrown off steel cages in front of screaming wrestling crowds, they were high school wrestling teammates at Ward Melville in New York.

James was the better wrestler initially, holding the top spot on the team until a back injury ended his season. Foley stepped into that vacancy and apparently never looked back, going on to become one of professional wrestling’s most beloved and punishment-absorbing performers. James found a different outlet, turning his physicality into physical comedy instead.

26. Chloë Sevigny And Topher Grace

Somewhere in Darien, Connecticut, a young Topher Grace was being babysat by the girl who would become one of indie cinema’s most iconic figures, and nursing a crush he had absolutely no chance with.

Sevigny was already developing the effortlessly cool aesthetic that would make her a downtown New York fixture before she was twenty, while Grace was just a kid in Connecticut with a babysitter way out of his league. Both ended up in Hollywood, and both built interesting careers. The crush, presumably, did not survive the transition.

27. Connie Britton And Lauren Graham

Long before one was cheering on a Texas football team and the other was speed-talking her way through Stars Hollow, Connie Britton and Lauren Graham were splitting rent somewhere in New York. Two struggling actresses doing what struggling actresses do, going to auditions, waiting tables, sharing a bathroom, wondering if any of it was going to work out.

It did, obviously, for both of them, which is rare enough to be worth noting. For every pair of broke roommates who both end up as leads in beloved television series, there are thousands who don’t.

28. Timothée Chalamet And Ansel Elgort

LaGuardia High School in New York is the kind of place that shows up on celebrity bios so often it’s almost a cliché, but it keeps producing talent for a reason. Chalamet and Elgort came up through the same halls, shared the same teachers, and apparently spent their downtime playing basketball together before either had a film credit to their name.

Elgort broke through first with The Fault In Our Stars, Chalamet followed shortly after, and then some. The basketball games have probably gotten harder to schedule since then.

29. Busy Philipps And Colin Hanks

Busy Philipps and Colin Hanks met in college, dated for years, and then managed to do the thing that most people claim is impossible: stay good friends after it ended. No dramatic falling out, no years of awkward avoidance at industry events, just two people who figured out that the friendship was worth preserving after the relationship ran its course.

Both built solid careers on their own terms, Philipps through Dawson’s Creek and Cougar Town and a very candid Instagram presence, Hanks through a steady string of film and television work that carefully avoided trading too heavily on his father’s name.

30. Gwyneth Paltrow And Maya Rudolph

Gwyneth Paltrow and Maya Rudolph’s friendship is essentially inherited. Their fathers met as students in New Orleans, struck up their own friendship, and eventually both ended up in Hollywood sending their daughters to the same prestigious school.

Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica did the rest, putting two girls from connected families in the same classrooms and letting them build something that belonged to them rather than their parents. Paltrow went one direction toward prestige drama and lifestyle empires, Rudolph went another toward comedy and Saturday Night Live, but the friendship predates any of those choices by decades.

31. Amanda Seyfried And Mae Whitman

Amanda Seyfried and Mae Whitman were childhood friends before either had a serious career. Both were working young, navigating auditions and sets and the general strangeness of being a child in the entertainment industry, and they had each other through all of it.

They were walking red carpets together before either was famous enough to be the reason anyone showed up, two young actresses supporting each other through the slow grind before Seyfried landed Mean Girls and Mamma Mia and Whitman found her footing in Arrested Development and Parenthood.

32. Adam Levine And Jonah Hill

Middle school friends, Jonah Hill and Adam Levine, beat the odds, staying close from their school days all the way through to Hill standing at the altar officiating Levine’s 2014 wedding to model Behati Prinsloo.

Two kids from Los Angeles who went in completely different creative directions and somehow never lost the thread. Hollywood is full of people who claim old friendships while barely remembering each other’s birthdays. This one actually stuck.

33. Rachel Bilson And Rami Malek

Rami Malek, Rachel McAdams, and Kirsten Dunst all attended Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, though the nature of those friendships apparently varied considerably depending on who’s telling the story.

Malek has admitted to having a crush on Dunst, which is a very human thing to confess about a future Oscar winner you sat near in high school. His feelings about McAdams are reportedly less warm, with suggestions that she may have embellished the closeness of their shared history more than the facts quite support.

34. The Lonely Island

Three kids from Berkeley, California who grew up making each other laugh eventually ended up in 30 Rockefeller Plaza rewriting the rules of Saturday Night Live. Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer had been friends long before anyone gave them a platform.

They spent their adolescence in the Bay Area developing the specific comedic sensibility that would eventually produce Lazy Sunday and a string of digital shorts that dragged SNL into the internet age. The show hadn’t really figured out what to do with the internet yet when they arrived. The Lonely Island figured it out for them.

35. B.J. Novak And John Krasinski

BJ Novak and John Krasinski played Little League together as kids in Newton, Massachusetts, went to the same school, and then somehow ended up cast in the same television show as adults without any apparent orchestration on either of their parts.

Novak has called it the weirdest coincidence of his life, which is a reasonable assessment. Krasinski was the jock, basketball captain, not particularly interested in theater, while Novak was already gravitating toward performance. Krasinski found acting later, which worked out well enough, given what he’s done with it since.