Kat Dennings Reveals Her Actual Title

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

Through 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of the Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce podcast, the Shifting Gears star, 38, shared that she wasn’t even 10 years outdated when she determined to drop her given title: Katherine Victoria Litwack.

“My actual final title is Litwack — that’s all it’s essential to 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 Ladies alum advised 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 title for her moniker, recalling her mom Ellen Litwack’s good buddy Lloyd Alexander, who wrote youngsters’s fantasy books similar to The Chronicles of Prydain collection. 

“Randomly, he was my mom’s greatest buddy,” she stated. “So I went there each week till I used to be 15 years outdated, they usually have been like my grandparents, he and his spouse. And his spouse’s title was Janine Denni, she was French.”

The overseas final title left a younger Katherine pretty impressed. 

“And I assumed it could be a brilliant sick concept if I took her title 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 title 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 exhibits like Intercourse and the Metropolis, nonetheless, they didn’t at all times come simple.

Earlier this yr, 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 surroundings than it’s now,” she stated within the January 2025 interview. “There was not lots of inclusivity in any respect. It was very harsh. There was lots of extraordinarily detrimental suggestions and folks wouldn’t maintain again.”

“It was fairly loopy fascinated 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?’ They usually’d be like, ‘Effectively, they thought you were not fairly sufficient and also you’re fats.’ ”

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

As a substitute, she determined to proceed appearing regardless of the criticism. 

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

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