We generally don’t think of people who get dressed up and play for a living as the brightest bulbs in the bunch, but some definitely give off that impression more than others. Like, would anyone be surprised to learn that Natasha Lyonne has successfully defended a dissertation on The Divine Comedy?

To be clear, she hasn’t, as far as we know. In fact, the really impressive ones are sometimes the ones you’d least expect. Like…

5 Lisa Kudrow Don’t Miss Phoebe Buffay may have given her Friends headaches, but for the actor who played her, they were the family business. Her father is a doctor who specializes in the research and treatment of headaches, so after studying biology at Vassar, she worked for him for eight years doing medical research and even earned an author credit on an academic paper about the correlation between left-handedness and cluster headaches. Then she got the Friends job, which we can all agree was a better use of her time.

4 Rowan Atkinson The pratfall reinvented itself for Rowan Atkinson, but despite what his bumbling persona would have you believe, he was an academic all star, first at prep school, where he was a classmate of future prime minister Tony Blair, then at Oxford, where he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering. That’s also where he met Richard Curtis, with whom he would go on to develop the Black Adder and Mr. Bean franchises, so that was the end of that. His master’s thesis was a “Simulation Study of Self-Tuning Control Laws.” We bet it was wacky.

3 Nolan Gould As the parents of Modern Family’s Luke Dunphy once said, “There’s ‘book smart,’ and then there’s ‘street smart,’ and then there’s Luke,” but the actor who played him seems to be brimming with both. He skipped four grades in school before deciding to just graduate at age 13. Most people do that so they can get a head start on higher learning, but Gould seems to have just wanted to get this whole school thing over with, so he’s smarter than all of them.

2 Greg Graffin Advertisement Advertisement The frontman of Bad Religion’s academic accomplishments might be more impressive than his musical ones, and that’s really saying something. He has a PhD in zoology from Cornell, where he’s also taught natural science classes in addition to UCLA, and published several books on the theory of evolution. Imagine walking into science class and your teacher is Professor American Jesus.