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Think You Know This 2 Broke Girls Star? Truth Is, Even Her Name Isn't Real

Think You Know This 2 Broke Girls Star? Truth Is, Even Her Name Isn't Real
Image credit: CBS, Legion-Media

When a dramatic outlook takes over the identity.

Summary:

  • Kat Dennings is an American actress, mostly known for her parts in the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, and Thor movie franchise.
  • The actress started moving up her career from a very young age, as she moved to Los Angeles full-time right after graduating from school at 14.
  • What many fans don’t know is that the actress’ given name was Katherine Victoria Litwack, but she decided to go under Kat Dennings at all the acting gigs.

One topic that is often discussed about fame status and celebrities in 2023 is the parasocial celebrities they create with their fanbase. These relationships aren't usually backed by anything substantial.

Instead, they're based solely on fans' devotion to their favorite stars and the tiny bits of information about their lives that they get from social media and news outlets. As you can imagine, information that can easily be twisted in any direction.

In reality, the knowledge of celebrities' private lives remains as hidden as they and their management want it to be. And that is for the best if the practice stays that way.

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One of the examples that really goes to show you how incomplete your knowledge of your favorite celebrities is is the pseudonyms they use for their professional lives. Some of them sound so over the top and obvious that they are pretty easy to guess, but others balance out their own names with quite believable aliases.

From Brie Larson to Reese Witherspoon, it was almost impossible to guess which celebrities were given the name they used for their artistic accomplishments and which decided to go with a special stage name. The star of the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, Kat Dennings, with her seemingly ordinary name, is one of the latter cases.

Why Did Kat Dennings Change Her Name?

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If there's one thing we know about Hollywood and being a celebrity, it's that you have to be both extremely recognizable and memorable, not only by your looks and talent but by every other little detail, including your name. Although some would say that the less common the name, the better, others would disagree.

Kat Dennings, for example, didn't find that her first name, Katherine Victoria Litwack, rolled off the tongue as easily as she would have liked. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the actress' family is of Jewish descent, hence the last name. Accompanied by her parents, Dennings moved to Los Angeles at the age of 14 to pursue acting full-time.

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As you can imagine, any teenager with even a little bit of an edge would take the opportunity to create a stage name that would best represent them in an acting career. Kat did, and later explained her decision in a 2008 interview with Philadelphia Magazine:

“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. I was a precocious youngster. <...> It’s a sturdy Polish-Jewish name. I used to be really touchy about it, but I couldn’t care less now,” the actress stated.

The choices most millennials made as teenagers have haunted us for years in the form of hideous email addresses created in 2007 and weird nicknames that have stuck with some of us into adulthood.

It's hard to imagine what we would do in such a position of power at the age of 14, so kudos to Kat for choosing a great stage name that she can still proudly introduce herself with!

If you want to see what the actress is up to now, you can stream Hulu 's TV show Dollface, which the actress starred in from 2019 to 2022. She has also made quite a few appearances as Marvel's Darcy Lewis, including the most recent ones in WandaVision in 2021 and Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022. Both are available on Disney Plus.

Source: Philadelphia Magazine