TIM BURTON
CHEF“My first restaurant job was at Sir George’s
Smorgasbord in LA — $4.99 all you can eat.
‘All you can stomach’ was more like it. I lost
a Band-Aid once when I was making a Thousand
Island salad dressing — which was the same colour
as my Band-Aid — so some poor customer got that.
We were making flesh-coloured salad dressing.
The restaurant no longer exists, although not
because of that. It closed for other reasons.”JESSICA CHASTAIN
MUFFIN GIRL
“When I was in high school I had to get up at
four o’clock in the morning to work for a muffin
company. We would show up at the plant to pick
up this huge basket and cooler filled with orange
juice, and then I would go into office buildings
and carry this thing, yelling, ‘Muffins! Muffins!’ All
the guys would call me the muffin girl and I just
found it embarrassing. Muffin girl. Too many
jokes! It was terrible.”
JARED HARRIS
FARM HAND
“Cleaning out a chicken run in 48 degrees in
a tin hut on a kibbutz in Israel was a memorable
experience that I do not want to repeat. It was
meant to take me three days to do and I did it in
about six hours. I cleaned that place out. They
looked at me and said, ‘Jesus Christ, this guy
pulls his finger out. He can get a lot done.’ But
I had taken a look at it and said, ‘No way am
I coming back tomorrow. I am finishing this
fucking job today.’ I had a little trowel with
a six-inch head and a piece of wood. The place
hadn’t been cleaned out for probably four or five
months, and it was basically a giant, steaming,
crusty mess of chicken-shit pie.”
ROBERT CARLYLE
DECORATOR & WAREHOUSE WORKER
“I was a painter-decorator. It’s no real fun. People’s
image of that is a person hanging off a building
shouting at women in the summer. Imagine them
in the same building in the winter, when the
fuckin’ paintbrush is fuckin’ welded to your hand
with the cold. That’s the other side to it. That was
pretty horrific. That was what my father and my
uncles and my grandfather did — the Carlyles are
known for that. I also worked in an automotive
component place, a warehouse filled with car
parts. At the beginning of the day all these guys
in suits would come in and hand you a piece of
paper and you’d walk up and down these aisles
trying to find these fuckin’ things, and I can’t tell
you how fuckin’ cold it was. It was always freezing
cold. So my shit jobs have really been to do with
Robert Carlyle versus the fuckin’ cold, really.
I could bore you with another 20 of them.”
JONNY LEE MILLER
STOREMAN“I worked as a storeman at the Hard Rock Cafe
in Piccadilly, London, and I loved it. I used to bring
in all the deliveries. It was a fucking laugh, an
awesome place to work — they treated the
staff really good. It was 1988, and it was pretty
rock ’n’ roll.”“I LOST A BAND-AID
WHEN I WAS MAKING
A THOUSAND ISLAND
SALAD DRESSING,
SO SOME POOR
CUSTOMER GOT THAT.”
MICHAEL FASSBENDER MARKET RESEARCHER
“The most painful job I did was market research for the Royal Mail. Basically I had to call up people who
had made a complaint. Let’s say you had a golf club sent to you and it never arrived or got lost on the
way, I had to call you up and go through the questionnaire and see how you felt Royal Mail dealt with
the scenario. It was mind-numbing. There were a lot of angry people... I remember every time I left the
office I used to go straight to the bar to have a drink, because my brain was so numb.”