Rashida Jones has made quite the name for herself, but she admits her famous family helped her get there.
The Parks and Rec actress, 48, opened up to InStyle about her journey into the entertainment industry. While acknowledging that her mom, Peggy Lipton, is an actress and model and her dad, Quincy Jones, is a record producer, Jones said she didn’t grow up aiming to be famous.
“I had parents who were in the public eye, but they were extremely protective of us,” she explained. “Fame wasn't that much a part of my reality.”
Now that she understands what it means to be a celebrity, Jones said fame is “pretty poisonous.” She added that she is glad she wasn’t raised surrounded by it because now it “is not my favorite thing in the world.”
Jones went to Harvard for college, graduating with a degree in Comparative Study of Religion, so she didn’t intend to be a "nepo baby."
“People like the story of a legacy family and it's fun to write about and it's fun to think about you know, the ‘mini me’ and the person who looks like their mom or their dad,” she explained. “And then there's the resentment there too. But I think about it as, historically, people go into the family business more than they don't.”
When she was ready to enter the workforce, Jones said she was appreciative of the help her -
parents were able to provide her while she figured out what she wanted to do.
“My dad said to me, when I graduated from college, ‘You're gonna go wait in line with 70,000 other people for a job? That doesn't seem really that practical,’” Jones remembered. “And he was right.”
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After graduating in 1997, Jones said she worked in entertainment but her big break wasn’t until 2005 when she landed a role on The Office. It was then that she got a true taste of fame.
“I wasn't really in a place where people recognize me until I was in my 30s, which is a good thing, but it was also like a bit of a surprise,” Jones said. “By that point, you're like, ‘This is how I'm living my life.’ And then, all of a sudden, you're walking in New York and you're used to just walking on the streets, and then somebody's watching you.”
Jones is one of seven children, and several of them have also entered the entertainment industry. Their 28-time Grammy-winning dad has called fatherhood “one of the greatest blessings” in the past/
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