Here’s a fun fact about Kat Dennings: That is not the actress’ birth name.
The Shifting Gears sitcom actress reflected on choosing her stage name years at a young age—several years before she made her onscreen acting debut.
“I chose it when I was 9,” Kat told Kylie Kelce on the March 13 episode of her podcast Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce. “Because my real last name is Litwack. That’s all you need to hear. And at 9, I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. This is not going to work. I can’t see that name. She, slash I, was very ahead of her time.”
The 38-year-old, who acted in commercials before she made her official onscreen acting debut on a 2000 episode of Sex and the City, continued, “I was like, ‘This can’t be displayed on a poster. It shan’t happen.'”
When deciding her stage name, Kat drew inspiration from Janine Denni, the French wife of late The Black Cauldron author Lloyd Alexander, a writer she said was her mother’s best friend.
