During a recent appearance on Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce, Kat revealed that she actually decided to drop her given name — Katherine Victoria Litwack — when she was just 9 years old.
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“My real last name is Litwack — that’s all you need to hear,” she joked. “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. It was a CEO situation. I was like, ‘This can’t be displayed on a poster.’”
Kat then explained that she got the idea to change her name after visiting with a family friend, children’s fantasy author Lloyd Alexander. “Randomly, he was my mother’s best friend,” she said. “So I went there every week until I was 15 years old, and they were like my grandparents, he and his wife. 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. Literally, that was the thinking. That’s as far as it went. So Dennings is from her.”
As for the “Kat”? Well, she took inspiration from a surprising source — specifically, Christina Ricci’s character from the 1995 film Casper, who was Kat’s “favorite character at the time.”
“So I was like, ‘Okay, Kat Dennings. This is it, I can really picture it.’” she said. “It’s insane.”