Kat Dennings Reveals Her Actual Title

Kat Dennings knew early on she wished a cool stage identify. 

Throughout the Thursday, March 13 episode of the Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce podcast, the Shifting Gears star, 38, shared that she wasn’t even 10 years previous when she determined to drop her given identify: Katherine Victoria Litwack.

“My actual final identify is Litwack — that’s all you must hear,” the actress stated.

“At 9, I used to be like, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. This isn’t going to work,’ ” the 2 Broke Women alum instructed Kelce, 32.

Applauding her youthful self, Dennings added, “She-slash-I used to be very forward of her time.”

“It was a CEO state of affairs. I used to be like, ‘This could’t be displayed on a poster,’ ” the actress joked. 

She defined how she adopted that final identify for her moniker, recalling her mom Ellen Litwack’s good good friend Lloyd Alexander, who wrote kids’s fantasy books reminiscent of The Chronicles of Prydain collection. 

“Randomly, he was my mom’s finest good friend,” she stated. “So I went there each week till I used to be 15 years previous, and so they had been like my grandparents, he and his spouse. And his spouse’s identify was Janine Denni, she was French.”

The international final identify left a younger Katherine pretty impressed. 

“And I believed it could be a brilliant sick concept if I took her identify and made it completely different,” she stated. “Actually, that was the considering. That’s so far as it went. So Dennings is from her.”

Dennings additionally defined that selecting her first identify wasn’t so simple as abbreviating her personal. The actress credit Christina Ricci’s Kat within the film Casper as her “favourite character on the time” because the inspiration. 

“So I used to be like, ‘Okay, Kat Dennings. That is it, I can actually image it,’ ” she stated, including, “It’s insane.”

A number of years later, she was already touchdown important roles on reveals like Intercourse and the Metropolis, nonetheless, they didn’t all the time come simple.

Earlier this 12 months, Dennings spoke completely to PEOPLE about how casting administrators referred to as her “fats” and never “fairly” when she was simply 14.

“The time that I used to be auditioning and beginning to act, it was a really completely different setting than it’s now,” she stated within the January 2025 interview. “There was not quite a lot of inclusivity in any respect. It was very harsh. There was quite a lot of extraordinarily adverse suggestions and other people wouldn’t maintain again.”

“It was fairly loopy serious about it. I am like, ‘How can anybody say that about a little bit child? That is insane,’ ” the Dollface actress stated. “For instance, I used to be 12. I would go into an audition and I would do it, and my supervisor would name me and I would be like, ‘How’d it go?’ And so they’d be like, ‘Properly, they thought you were not fairly sufficient and also you’re fats.’ ”

By no means miss a narrative — join PEOPLE’s free day by day publication to remain up-to-date on one of the best of what PEOPLE has to supply​​, from superstar information to forcing human curiosity tales.

Dennings admitted, “For some purpose, it did not break my spirit.”

As an alternative, she determined to proceed performing regardless of the criticism. 

“I used to be like, ‘I will present them,'” she added laughing.

Shifting Gears airs on ABC Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.