Chrisean Rose

TEYANA TAYLOR as JANET JACKSON Taylor knew she “had no business” sneaking to watch the DVD of Janet Jackson’s 1999 Velvet Rope tour when she was just 9 years old. Good thing she did it anyway. That’s when “I knew I wanted to be an artist,” says the singer-actress, 35.

As Olivia Pope, Scandal’s commanding lead, Kerry Washington spent seven seasons as number one on the call sheet, the production schedule that ranks actors on a project. That list, and her place on it, looked different last summer when Washington was filming Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third installment of the campy detective series. The star-studded cast includes Daniel Craig, Glenn Close, and Jeremy Renner, to name a few.

The year is 1916; World War I is raging, and you've just been deployed to the Bermuda Garrison. As a born-and-bred Englishman, the scorching island climate is a stark contrast to the cooler temperatures of home. Your thick woolen uniform is unbearable in this heat. You enlisted to fight the Central Powers, but they didn’t say anything about fighting heatstroke. What do you do? Naturally, you take a pair of scissors to your trousers, creating a makeshift solution to the sweltering temperatures.