Here’s a fun fact about Kat Dennings: That is not the actress’ birth name.

The Shifting Gears sitcom actress reflected on choosing her stage name years at a young age—several years before she made her onscreen acting debut.

“I chose it when I was 9,” Kat told Kylie Kelce on the March 13 episode of her podcast Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce. “Because my real last name is Litwack. That’s all you need to hear. And at 9, I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. This is not going to work. I can’t see that name. She, slash I, was very ahead of her time.”

The 38-year-old, who acted in commercials before she made her official onscreen acting debut on a 2000 episode of Sex and the City, continued, “I was like, ‘This can’t be displayed on a poster. It shan’t happen.’”

When deciding her stage name, Kat drew inspiration from Janine Denni, the French wife of late The Black Cauldron author Lloyd Alexander, a writer she said was her mother’s best friend.

“I went there every week until I was 15 years old. They were like my grandparents,” the 2 Broke Girls alum said. “I thought it would be a super sick idea if I took her name and made it like, kind of different. So Dennings is from her.”

The Thor star, whose full real name is Katherine, also drew inspiration from a fellow actress’ movie character when choosing her stage name.

“Kat, I chose, because 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.”

Kat has spoken before about her stage name decision. “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 in 2008. “I was a precocious youngster.”

The actress added that while Litwack is a “sturdy Polish-Jewish name,” she “used to be really touchy about it.” She added, “But I couldn’t care less now.”

Read on to find out the real names of more celebs…