Hidden-Talent Facts

Rod Stewart secretly spent 23 years building a 1,500-square-foot model city in his attic - a 1940s American metropolis with five-foot skyscrapers. On tour, he reserved extra hotel rooms just to keep building.

Dexter Holland, lead singer of The Offspring ("Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)"), was deep into a PhD in molecular biology when the band exploded with their 1994 album Smash. He paused the doctorate for nearly two decades. In 2017, he finished it - his 175-page thesis on microRNA in HIV earned him a doctorate from USC.

Sylvester Stallone painted Rocky before he wrote him. In 1975, broke and typecast as a movie villain, he painted a self-portrait called "Finding Rocky." He carved the eyes with a screwdriver to get the sadness right. The script came later. Stallone never stopped painting after that. In 2021, Germany's Osthaus Museum Hagen gave him his full museum retrospective. Nearly 50 canvases, timed to his 75th birthday.