It shouldn’t be a surprise that Kate Beckinsale is smart. She’s almost genius-level IQ smart. Her beauty might distract from the fact that she’s often publicly witty and sarcastic in a clever way that catches anyone dumb enough to try and troll her social media off-guard, but still, the evidence is all there.
So it’s not all that crazy to learn that according to the actress herself, she has an IQ of 152 and it’s been a distinct disadvantage in dumb old Hollywood.
Beckinsale revealed this unexpected wrinkle in her career during an interview with Howard Stern, seen in the video above.
She did attend Oxford, after all, where she studied French and Russian literature. But obviously, the life of a scholar wasn’t what the 48-year-old star of the Underworld film franchise as well as the new Paramount+ series Guilty Party was meant for. Still, she told Stern that her brain hasn’t been a plus in looks-obsessed Hollywood.
“Every single doctor, every single person I’ve ever come across has said, ‘You’d be so much happier if you were 30 percent less smart,’” Beckinsale said.
“It’s no good to me, though,” she continued, “It’s really not helpful to me in my career. I just think it might have been a handicap actually.”
Beckinsale, who is still recovering from an injury received while filming a movie in Las Vegas, did manage to joke with Stern that her IQ was tested when she was a child and she may have “burned” off some brain matter in the years since.
Regarding the injury, Beckinsale used the way she got it to achieve some points in self-deprecation. She didn’t get it doing some kind of sophisticated stunt or anything like that, no—she got hurt “putting on a pair of leggings … it felt like a sort of guitar string snapped and everything was horrible.”
“I couldn’t walk,” she said, “I couldn’t lie down, I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t do anything.”
It’s good to know she’s on the mend and also that she’s maintained a sense of humor about the whole thing. It’s also good that we now know the true extent of the British actress’s intelligence. One big takeaway there might be never, ever play Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble with Kate Beckinsale.
Whether you’re into brainy types or not, enjoy some selections old and new from her always intriguing Instagram account below.
