When she was just 9 years old, Kat Dennings made a big career decision — she created the stage name that she still uses to this day.
Dennings, 38, known for her roles as Max Black in “2 Broke Girls” and Darcy Lewis in the Marvel universe, was born with a very different name: Katherine Litwack.
“My real last name is Litwack — that’s all you need to hear,” she said on the “Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelcie” podcast.
Even at a young age, Dennings says she sensed her last name might not be the most marketable.
“At 9, I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. This is not going to work,’” she said.
“She-slash-I was very ahead of her time,” she added, referring to her younger self. “It was a CEO situation. I was like, ‘This can’t be displayed on a poster.’”
As for how she came up with the name Dennings? The answer involves a deep dive into the actor’s family connections.
Dennings’ mom, poet and speech therapist Ellen Litwack, was apparently good friends with Lloyd Alexander, the author of beloved children’s fantasy novels including the “The Chronicles of Prydain” series.
“Randomly, he was my mother’s best friend. So I went there every week until I was 15 years old, and they were like my grandparents, he and his wife,” Dennings explained. “And his wife’s name was Janine Denni, she was French.
“And I thought it would be a super sick idea if I took her name and made it different,” she continued. “Literally, that was the thinking. That’s as far as it went. So Dennings is from her.”
Dennings said she has used “all kinds of nicknames” for her real first name, Katherine, and explained that she landed on Kat as her official first name thanks to the 1995 movie “Casper.”
“Christina Ricci’s character Kat in the movie ‘Casper’ was my favorite character at the time,” she said. “So I was like, ‘OK, Kat Dennings. This is it, I can really picture it.’ … It’s insane.”
Dennings has opened up about her stage name in the past. Back in 2008, when she was just about to release one of her early comedies, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” Dennings opened up to Philadelphia Magazine about why she didn’t use her real last name professionally.
“I didn’t want to use my family name because I thought, A, it was a little hideous, and B, I wanted to know when someone really knew me or they didn’t,” she said. “I was a precocious youngster.”
She added that she “used to be really touchy” about her last name, which she called a “sturdy Polish-Jewish name.”
But said she “couldn’t care less” now.