Umair
Kat Dennings spilled the beans from her creative thought process of giving herself a rad professional name.
In the Thursday, March 13 episode of the Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce podcast, the 2 Broke Girls alum revealed she wasn’t even 10 years old when she decided to change her birth name: Katherine Victoria Litwack.
“At nine, I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. This is not going to work,’” the Shifting Gears star recounted. “She-slash-I was very ahead of her time.”
“It was a CEO situation. I was like, ‘This can’t be displayed on a poster,’” the American actress quipped.
That’s when she took matters into her own hands. During her conversation with Kylie, who is Taylor Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce’s sister-in-law, the Thor actress detailed how she opted for her current last name.
She recalled that Lloyd Alexander, who wrote children’s favourite fantasy books such as The Chronicles of Prydain series, was her mother Ellen Litwack’s best friend.
“I went there [Alexander’s home] every week until I was 15 years old, and they were like my grandparents, he and his wife. And his wife’s name was Janine Denni; She was French,” Dennings, 32, shared.
She took his wife’s name, tweaked, and devised a moniker: Dennings.
Moreover, Kat is not an abbreviation of her original name; it was inspired by Christina Ricci’s Kat from Casper, which was Dennings’ favourite character at the time.
“So I was like, ‘Okay, Kat Dennings. This is it, I can really picture it,’” the actress, known for her role as Max Black in the CBS sitcom, said, adding, “It’s insane.”
