Kat Dennings has opened up about how her stage name was created.
The 2 Broke Girls alum revealed that she decided a name change was needed when she was just nine years old during an during an appearance on Kylie Kelce’s Not Gonna Lie podcast this week.
“My real last name is Litwack — that’s all you need to hear,” she told Kelce. “At 9, I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. This is not going to work.’”
“She-slash-I was very ahead of her time,” she added, joking about the decision to go by a different name.
Dennings described the name change as a “CEO situation,” where she felt her real name couldn’t be seen on a “poster.”
The decision to chose “Kat” was inspired by Christina Ricci’s character of the same name in the movie Casper, which Dennings said was her “favorite character at the time.”
Her new last name ended up coming from the wife of her mother’s friend, which was Janine Denni.
“I thought it would be a super sick idea if I took her name and made it different,” she said. “Literally, that was the thinking. That’s as far as it went. So Dennings is from her.”
“So I was like, ‘Okay, Kat Dennings. This is it, I can really picture it,’” she added.
Despite changing her name, Dennings has previously revealed the cruel comments she faced about her appearance at the start of her acting career, also at nine years old.
Speaking to People back in January she recalled receiving some “extremely negative feedback” from casting directors via her agent including being told that she was “too fat.”
“It was pretty crazy thinking about it. I’m like: “How can anyone say that about a little kid? This is insane,” she said. “I was 12. I’d go into an audition and I’d do it, and my manager would call me and I’d be like: ‘How’d it go?’ And they’d be like: ‘Well, they thought you weren’t pretty enough and you’re fat.’”
“The time that I was auditioning and starting to act, it was a very different environment than it is now,” Dennings reflected.
“There was not a lot of inclusivity at all. It was very harsh. There was a lot of extremely negative feedback and people would not hold back,” the actor said.
Dennings, who went on to front her own sitcom, 2 Broke Girls, alongside Beth Behrs from 2011 to 2017, said she managed to retain her “strong mindset” despite the negative comments.
“For some reason, it didn’t break my spirit,” she said. “I was like: ‘I’ll show them.’ I guess props to my parents because they were like: ‘They’re idiots. Don’t listen to them.’ And I was like: ‘They’re idiots, I’m not.’”
The 38-year-old actor revealed she thinks the entertainment industry is “much softer” and “kinder” today than the “completely insane” showbiz landscape she faced as a child.
“There’s body positivity, there’s inclusivity, there’s representation, and there was none of that before. It was really gross,” she said.
