What Most People Don’t Know About Kat Dennings
Kat Dennings is one of those rare actors who’s grown up right in front of viewers’ eyes. Since making her first onscreen appearance at age 14, Dennings’ talent continued to shine through in the numerous roles that followed. Among her most memorable: the titular Nora in quirky 2008 rom-com Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist; Darcy Lewis in Marvel’s first two Thor movies; Abby, host of a dysfunctional holiday gathering in Friendsgiving; and, in her best-known role, wisecracking waitress Max Black on hit sitcom 2 Broke Girls, which ran from 2011 until 2017. As her IMDb page demonstrates, Dennings more recently starred in Hulu’s 2019 comedy Dollface, playing a woman who reconnects with the female friends she’d been neglecting after her boyfriend dumped her.
When she’s not involved in a film or TV project, this in-demand star tends to maintain a low profile, which is why her fans may not know her as well as they think they do. Admitting that certain non-acting parts of fame, like popping up on the covers of magazines, makes her “really uncomfortable,” Dennings reasoned to The Philadelphia Inquirer back in 2011, “If being successful means tolerating a certain amount of being uncomfortable, that’s part of my job.”
Let’s discover what most people don’t know about Kat Dennings.
Kat Dennings was homeschooled — and graduated high school at 14
Despite having highly educated parents — her mother’s a poet and her father is a molecular pharmacologist — Kat Dennings’ education was far from typical. As she told Complex, she was homeschooled. “I took charge of my education towards the end of it,” the actor explained. “I just couldn’t deal with being in the tiny room with my parents anymore. But it worked great. I don’t think I could have dealt with traditional school, just the way my brain is wired.”
That bore out when Dennings eventually attended high school — but just for half a day. As she told Philadelphia magazine, the experience “almost broke [her] spirit forever.” She recalled her in-school education as being as unpleasant as it was brief, revealing, “I was yelled at. People made fun of my outfit. I filled out some questionnaire and realized I spelled ‘friend’ wrong. That was a word I mastered, eventually. I remember feeling so stupid, and I thought, f**k this.”
As the Daily News pointed out, Dennings instead continued her education by herself. She completed all the necessary steps to graduate high school, and received her diploma when she was just 14.
Kat Dennings changed her name because she thought it was ‘a little hideous’
One thing Kat Dennings’ legions of fans may not realize is that her famous name is actually made up: this star was born Katherine Victoria Litwack, but made the decision to change her moniker as a teenager when she decided to pursue an acting career. “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 told Philadelphia magazine. “I was a precocious youngster.”
While Dennings conceded that Katherine Litwack is “a sturdy Polish-Jewish name,” she admitted to being “really touchy about” her name at one point, but added, “I couldn’t care less now.” The actor obviously prefers “Kat” as opposed to the other shortened variations of Katherine, but there is one she absolutely loathes. “And Katherine has Katie, Kat, and if you want to die, Kathy, but no one can go there — no one,” she joked.
A teenage Kat Dennings made her TV debut on Sex and the City
Kat Dennings got her start as a child actor on TV commercials. As she told Philadelphia magazine, she was just 10 when she appeared in an ad spot for “those potato chips that had that poisonous ingredient.”
All that experience in commercials led to her big break: playing a “bratty” 13-year-old on an episode of Sex and the City. As HUFFPOST recalled, Dennings portrayed Jenny Brier, the daughter of a wealthy Manhattan restaurateur who hires Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) to plan her million-dollar bat mitzvah.
Dennings reminisced about appearing on Sex and the City while promoting the first season of 2 Broke Girls at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in 2011. Recalling that appearing in the show “changed [her] life,” Dennings said (via Collider), “Really it did. I was a homeschooled kid living in the forest, and I didn’t even have cable. I’m serious. We had to get cable to watch that episode.” Dennings went on to joke of Charlotte York’s (Kristin Davis) onscreen love interest at the time, “So all my little homeschool friends and their moms saw Kyle MacLachlan’s a**.”
