Kat Dennings has had a long journey to fame and success. In just a couple of short decades,
she's starred in sitcoms, indie flicks, and major blockbusters. Keep watching to discover how she
went from a kid growing up in Pennsylvania to a big deal crushing it in Hollywood.
Kat Dennings grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia as the youngest of five children.
Her poet mother and scientist father decided to homeschool her, and she finished high
school at the age of 14. She and her siblings weren't allowed to watch TV while growing up;
instead, they were raised on old Hollywood musicals. One of her favorites was the 1935
Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Top Hat. Adding to the uniqueness of her childhood,
her family home was apparently pretty spooky. As she told The A.V. Club in 2018,
"I grew up in a house that was built in 1694, and it was haunted as f--- [...] It sounds so
crazy, but I swear — you could ask my father, who is 89, who saw some s---."
Nowadays, Dennings is known for her glamorous, old Hollywood look,
but she had a slightly different style as a kid. During a 2014 appearance on Conan,
she confessed that she went through a serious goth phase when she was young.
"I was kind of obsessed with The Addams Family, and I went through a phase where
I thought I was Wednesday Addams, and I would introduce myself as Wednesday to strangers."
Dennings also slept with her arms crossed over her chest,
and her parents were totally unfazed by her behavior. It helps to be the youngest of five!
Dennings got into the acting game from a young age, logging her first performances
when she was only 9 years old. As she revealed to Backstage in 2013,
"If I had had my way I would have been acting much sooner than that. I was that
kid who just wouldn't stop hounding her parents to let her try acting."
"I'm glad I didn't end up in some sort of child institution,
because they found me doing a lot of weird stuff."
Dennings never really trained in acting; instead,
she took just one acting class and hated it. As she recalled with great gusto to Backstage,
"We had to do the thing where you like get on the floor and you have to be like a tree,
and I was like, 'What does this have to do with film and cinema?'"
Dennings estimated that she started out by shooting one commercial a month,
and then at the age of 13, she got her first big role on an episode of Sex and the City
as a sassy teenager who faces off against Samantha. Soon afterwards, she landed a part on a
pilot that was filmed in Los Angeles. She and her mom moved there so that she could shoot the pilot
and continue to pursue her acting career, and then she ended up staying in the city.
After Dennings grew out of her goth phase and stopped wanting to emulate Wednesday Addams,
she began to develop a more grown-up sense of fashion. As she revealed to InStyle in 2019,
she used to visit thrift stores with her mother, and it was on these trips
that she discovered a look that would carry her into adulthood. Basically,
she realized that her body type wasn't suited to modern fashions. As she recalled,
"It wasn't for me. But whenever I went to a vintage store, and tried on dresses from the 1940s
and 1950s, everything fit perfectly. Just because a curvier shape was more, like, of the time."
For Dennings, these trips to the thrift stores proved instrumental,
so she decided to commit to sporting vintage looks. As she put it to InStyle,
"I figured out in that moment, 'Fine, I belong in this style. It feels like I am included in this.'"
Dennings was only 14 when she landed her first regular TV gig in 2001,
on The WB sitcom Raising Dad. The show starred Bob Saget as a widowed father
trying to keep it together while raising two daughters,
who were played by Dennings and future Captain Marvel Brie Larson. For Dennings, it was her
first taste of life as a professional actor. As she recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2019,
"We still lived in Pennsylvania,
so they flew me out with my mom and we did the pilot and then we went home."
The show, which ran for one season, was also special because it introduced Dennings
to one of her best friends, Rodene Jones, who played a background part. As Dennings gushed,
"She's still my best friend to this day. She had blue cornrows that were,
like, down to her ass, and I was like, 'Who's that? Hello? We're friends.'"
After years of playing various guest roles on TV, Dennings eventually broke out on the big
screen. In 2004, she played the part of Sloane in the Hilary Duff-starring Raise Your Voice.
But her true breakout happened the following year, when she starred alongside Steve
Carell in The 40 Year-Old Virgin. As she recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2019,
"I went to a few auditions for renowned casting director Allison Jones,
she does all those movies that are amazing. And I somehow got that role, and I just loved it.
It was such an interesting process. It was such a cool film to be in [...] It
was everybody's first, like, big thing, and it was just amazing to be part of it."
Dennings certainly made an impression on her co-stars. As her onscreen mother
Catherine Keener declared in The New York Times,
Dennings was already "a natural," even though she was still just a teenager.
It wasn't long after The 40-Year-Old Virgin that Kat Dennings would have even more to offer
moviegoers. When she and Michael Cera played the title characters in 2008's Nick & Norah's
Infinite Playlist, it proved to be quite a career-defining role for her. The film wasn't
a huge hit at the box office, but she nevertheless earned some wonderful reviews. And over the years,
her performance has stood the test of time. As Decider wrote in 2018,
"[Dennings] imbued [Norah] — a role that could have very easily waded into stock
character territory — with an achingly poetic depth and explosive comedic bite."
At the time, Dennings felt like she'd really hit
the jackpot. As she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019,
"I loved the role. I felt so connected to it. I had had a couple of auditions
with Peter Sollett, the director, who is just heaven [...] [He] was such an
understanding and fantastic director — really sensitive and prepared."
She also noted,
"I made friends with everybody, and I just had the best time. We all ran around New York on a
44-day night shoot. What you're really watching is the best autumn of all those kids' lives."
After Nick & Norah, Dennings continued working steadily in movies, most notably as Darcy Lewis
in 2011's Thor. But her next big lead role brought her back to a regular small screen gig,
as she played Max the diner waitress on 2 Broke Girls. The CBS sitcom premiered in the fall of
2011 and ran for six seasons until 2017, and it had a significant connection to Dennings'
first-ever TV role. 2 Broke Girls co-creator Michael Patrick King had previously worked
on Sex and the City, which Dennings had guest starred on back in 2000. In 2011, he raved to GQ,
"I don't think there's anybody else like her so we basically hunted her down for this.
She has a kind of amazing outsider edge. It made everything else fall into place."
The show ended up being a massive hit, but after six years playing the same character,
Dennings was ready for a new challenge. In 2019, she told the Los Angeles Times,
"By the end, I just wanted to burn that waitress uniform. Not
that there's anything wrong with the show. I'm very proud of it."
In 2014, Dennings had a bit of a high-profile romance when she
started dating musician Josh Groban. The couple actually met through Beth Behrs,
Dennings' 2 Broke Girls co-star. However, Groban had already caught Dennings' eye
through his online activity. As she noted on The Ellen DeGeneres Show,
"He's very witty on the Twitter, and I saw his little tweets sometimes."
Behrs and Groban had been friends for a while and she thought that he and Dennings
would get along since they're both nerds. The relationship started out pretty well.
As Dennings recounted during an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers, they enjoyed a
week in New York going to plays, sleeping in, playing video games, and eating good food.
"You know, normal people things."
"Yeah, that's all really good."
"Yeah, it was good. And then he's in Denmark now about to sing for the queen, and I'm with you."
"Wow."
“Yeah."
"Point: Groban."
But ultimately, the Dennings-Groban romance wasn't meant to last forever,
as they split up in 2016. A source told E! News that the breakup was a mutual decision.
Perhaps it was for the best. As Dennings told the Los Angeles Times in 2019,
"I've been through this thing where you're so in love that you forget yourself."
When Kat Dennings took on her next big TV role, it was definitely a far cry from Max the waitress.
Beginning in 2019, she starred on the Hulu sitcom Dollface as the lead character, Jules,
a heartbroken woman who tries to reconnect with old friends after getting dumped.
"I have no clue if I still have a job or an income,
but I'm glad I have you guys to figure it out."
This wasn't just a new acting opportunity for Dennings. It was also a chance to take on a
more hands-on role behind the camera, as it was her first experience as a producer,
and it did not disappoint. As she explained to Schön! Magazine,
"I was ready for a more involved role in the next job I took on, before I even read this script."
While acting remained her number one passion, she was looking for a way to provide more
input into a project as a whole. And Dollface, which was produced by Margot Robbie's company
LuckyChap Entertainment, seemed like the perfect opportunity. As Dennings explained,
"Margot and her company [were] very involved and collaborative, and I felt very heard."
And based on how things went for her this time around,
we'll probably see a lot more producing credits for Dennings in the future, as she gushed,
"I love producing and I'd do it again in a heartbeat."
Dennings is a vegetarian, though that wasn't always the case. While growing up, she ate just
about everything. But this all changed in 2020 after she saw the David Attenborough documentary
A Life on Our Planet. Dennings then took to Instagram and declared in a since-deleted video,
"I will never be the same. David Attenborough's film is a handbook
for how the human race can come together to stop destroying our round blue home.
I'm definitely going plant-based starting tomorrow. Except for butter. But other than that."
In another since-deleted post from 2020,
Dennings went into more detail about her new diet, as she revealed,
"Fun fact about your Uncle Kat: I am not vegan. I am,
however, very excited to make more plant-based choices in my life,
but please don’t hold me to any standard. I’m just a girl, looking at oat milk, asking
it to love her. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to sprinkle ground-up fish onto my vegetable garden."
In 2011, Dennings made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in Thor as Darcy Lewis,
intern to Natalie Portman's Jane Foster. It was originally meant to just be a fairly small part,
but then that started changing. As Dennings explained to WhoWhatWear in 2021,
"The role gradually got a bit bigger and a bit bigger,
and it was like, 'Do they realize what they are doing?'"
When Marvel came calling again a decade later for Darcy to reappear in the 2021 TV show WandaVision,
Dennings was shocked all over again. The offer to come back
on board all these years later was an expected one, but the chance to
reprise the part was ultimately thrilling for Dennings. As she confessed to Looper,
"I will say that I was surprised by what they do with Darcy. It's very exciting.
It was exciting for me. I mean, anyone who's a fan of Darcy will be very happy."
"Part of me secretly wanted a guest spot on this show, but seriously, that sucked."
We sure hope that Darcy continues to pop up in the MCU,
and we bet we're not the only ones who feel that way!
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