Fame is a wonderful education in many things — red carpets, private jets, having a person whose whole job is your calendar. What it apparently does not teach is laundry. Or driving. Or how a gas pump works.
Every celebrity on this list has, at some point, cheerfully admitted to missing a basic life skill that the rest of us picked up by necessity. No judgement from me — if someone else had been doing my washing since I was nine, I would be on this list too. (For a different kind of celebrity disappearance, see my piece on singers who were everywhere, then vanished.)
1. Kendall Jenner vs. a Cucumber
In 2022, a scene from her family’s reality show showed Kendall Jenner attempting to slice a cucumber at her mother Kris Jenner’s house — and producing one of the most alarming knife techniques ever broadcast. Arms crossed over each other, fingers hovering near the blade, the whole operation conducted like defusing a bomb.
The clip became an instant classic because it was so revealing: when a personal chef has handled vegetables for your entire life, nobody ever thinks to teach you the basics. The cucumber survived. So did Kendall. The internet’s faith in celebrity knife skills did not.
2. Macaulay Culkin Never Learned Laundry — or Driving
The Home Alone star grew up with adults handling everything, and some of those arrangements simply never ended. Culkin has been open about never learning to do laundry, and his partner, actress Brenda Song, has shared that he also never learned to drive — and that she tried to teach him when he was in his forties.
There is something almost impressive about reaching your forties as one of the most famous child actors in history without ever needing to parallel park. Childhood fame doesn’t just skip childhood; apparently it skips the driving test too.
3. Selena Gomez Asked a Paparazzo to Move Her Car
In 2013, a 20-year-old Selena Gomez pulled into a gas station, realised she had parked on the wrong side of the pump for her BMW’s fuel cap — and asked one of the paparazzi following her to move the car for her. Remarkably, one of them did.
It remains one of the most efficient summaries of early fame ever captured: a pop star so unused to the choreography of ordinary driving that the nearest available adult — a man whose job was photographing her — had to step in and reposition the vehicle.
4. Jake Bongiovi Travels Without Packing Anything
Actor Jake Bongiovi, husband of Millie Bobby Brown, has a travel system — if you can call it that. According to his wife’s interviews, he simply does not pack clothes for trips. He arrives with a phone and a laptop, frequently forgets his charger, and then proposes shopping when he gets there.
As travel strategies go, it is either total chaos or total genius: no luggage, no waiting at baggage carousels, a new outfit in every city. Most of us pack for a trip; Bongiovi treats the destination as the wardrobe department.
5. Cardi B Owned Five Luxury Cars and Couldn’t Drive
At the peak of her early fame, Cardi B had a garage most collectors would envy — and no idea how to operate any of it. She admitted on Carpool Karaoke in 2018 that she owned five luxury cars despite not knowing how to drive.
Host James Corden attempted a driving lesson during the segment, and it went about as well as you would expect when the student learned in a car worth more than most houses. The cars, for a long time, were essentially very expensive furniture.
6. Channing Tatum Bought New T-Shirts Instead of Doing Laundry
Channing Tatum’s solution to laundry, during one legendary period of his life, was retail. He has said he hated doing laundry so much that he spent roughly a year simply buying new white T-shirts instead of washing the ones he owned.
As life hacks go, it is wasteful, expensive, and completely understandable to anyone who has ever stared down a mountain of washing and felt their soul leave their body. The difference is that most of us cannot afford the T-shirt economy. Tatum could, and for a year, he did.
7. Oprah Winfrey Doesn’t Pump Her Own Gas
Oprah Winfrey — billionaire, broadcaster, one of the most capable people alive — admitted in a 2018 interview, alongside Reese Witherspoon, that she did not know how to pump her own gas.
In fairness, when you have had a driver for several decades, the gas station becomes a place you are driven past, not a skill you maintain. It is a useful reminder that ‘basic’ skills are only basic if your life requires them. Oprah’s life, for a very long time, has not.
8. Kim Kardashian Hasn’t Been Grocery Shopping in Years
Kim Kardashian has revealed that she went years without doing her own grocery shopping — the errand simply belonged to other people. She even once described wanting to rent out a branch of the Ralphs supermarket for her birthday so she could push her children around in a cart like an ordinary family.
Pause on that: the fantasy was not a yacht or a private island. It was a supermarket trolley. When your life is staffed to that degree, the most mundane errand in the world becomes an exotic experience you have to book.
9. Lily Allen Can’t Use a Washing Machine
Singer Lily Allen admitted on her Miss Me? podcast in 2024 that she does not know how to use a washing machine — a confession delivered with the cheerful shamelessness of someone who knows exactly how it sounds.
Of all the machines in a modern home, the washing machine is arguably the friendliest: a dial, a button, an hour of patience. But if laundry has been leaving your house and returning folded since you were a teenager, the dial might as well be the controls of a small aircraft.
10. Kylie Jenner Failed Her Sisters’ Laundry Quiz
When Kylie Jenner moved into her first house at 17, back in 2015, her older sisters Kim and Khloé did what older sisters do: they quizzed her on the basics of running the place — laundry, ironing, the essentials. On camera, for Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the answers were not forthcoming.
To be fair to teenage Kylie, most 17-year-olds would struggle with an ironing interrogation. Most 17-year-olds, however, are not moving into a mansion with staff just out of frame, ready to make the questions permanently theoretical.
11. Kaia Gerber Couldn’t Check Into a Hotel — or Work a Dishwasher
Model Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford, grew up so thoroughly looked-after that the basics formed a backlog. As a young model, her driver handled hotel check-ins for her, so she never learned the process herself.
Then came her first New York apartment at 17, and with it an undefeated opponent: the dishwasher. By her own account she could not work out how to run it — and was too proud to call her mother and ask. Somewhere in Manhattan, a supermodel’s daughter once stood in a kitchen, defeated by an appliance with three buttons.
12. Cher Doesn’t Know How to Order a Pizza
According to comedian Kathy Griffin, who tells the story from a hangout at her own house, Cher — six decades into being Cher — did not know how to order a pizza.
Consider what that implies about the logistics of Cher’s life: for roughly sixty years of superstardom, pizza has simply arrived, arranged by others, like weather. At some point a skill stops being something you lack and becomes something your entire operation was designed so you would never need.
13. Christopher Nolan Has No Smartphone and No Email
Director Christopher Nolan is the list’s most deliberate entry: he has no smartphone and no email account. People who need to reach him do it the old ways, and emails intended for him are printed out by others so he can read them on paper.
This is less ‘can’t’ than ‘absolutely refuses to’ — a considered position from a man who shoots on film in an industry of screens. But by any normal standard, functioning in 2026 without a phone or an inbox is an everyday-skill gap of heroic proportions, maintained entirely on purpose.
14. Kim and Kourtney Kardashian Took Their First Subway Ride in 2010
In 2010, Kim and Kourtney Kardashian rode the New York City subway for the first time — an event documented by cameras as though it were a trip to the moon.
Millions of New Yorkers perform this exact journey twice a day without thinking about it. For the sisters, raised in Calabasas and chauffeured through fame, the MetroCard era had simply never begun. It is perhaps the purest example on this list of fame not removing a skill, but removing the entire situation where the skill would ever come up.
15. Megan Fox Doesn’t Clean
Actress Megan Fox said in a 2007 interview that she is horrible to live with, because she does not clean — clothes come off and stay where they land, and tidying is simply not a department she staffs personally.
There is an honesty to the entry that deserves respect: not ‘I never learned because of fame’, just a flat admission that cleaning is not happening. Every household has one person who believes the floor is a shelf. Occasionally, that person is Megan Fox.
16. Barbra Streisand Can’t Cook — or Make Coffee
Barbra Streisand, owner of one of the most celebrated voices of the last century, said in a 2012 interview that she cannot cook — and that she would not know how to make coffee.
It is a strangely comforting entry. Generations of performers have modelled themselves on Streisand’s talent and discipline; meanwhile the kettle remains undefeated. Greatness, it turns out, is highly specialised, and it does not automatically come with breakfast.
17. Hilary Duff Is Just Bad at Laundry
Actress and singer Hilary Duff admitted in 2016 that she is really bad at doing laundry — the most human-scale confession on this entire list.
Not ‘my staff handles it’, not ‘I never learned’. Just bad at it, like millions of civilians who shrink the jumpers and pink the whites. After sixteen entries of fame-induced helplessness, Duff closes the skills gap with simple relatability: some people are just not laundry people, and occasionally they are also Lizzie McGuire.
18. Anna Kendrick Can’t Cook
Actress Anna Kendrick admitted in a 2024 interview that she does not know how to cook — placing her firmly in the large, silent fellowship of adults sustained by restaurants and delivery apps.
Kendrick built a career on being relatably unpolished, so the confession fits the brand beautifully. But it also lands the list’s quiet conclusion: you do not need fame to miss a basic skill. You just need a life in which someone — a parent, a partner, a driver, a delivery courier — always got there first.
The pattern across all eighteen is the same: these are not stupid people — several of them run empires. They are people whose lives were organised, very early, so that the ordinary never reached them. The cucumber, the washing machine, and the gas pump are undefeated by fame for a simple reason: nobody ever made these eighteen learn, and necessity, as ever, is the only teacher who never cancels class.
