Congratulations to Post Malone, who cleverly incorporated his surname into his stage name. However, the rapper prefers his close friends to call him by his real name. During the 2024 MTV VMAs, Taylor Swift referred to him as “Austin” when they won the Best Collaboration award for their duet “Fortnight.”
Though she portrayed Lilly on *Modern Family* under the name Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, the actress changed her moniker to Frances Anderson to mark a new era as a musician. “Frances is actually part of my legal name—it’s my middle name, and it’s after my mom’s old family friend,” she explained in a 2025 E! News interview. “I thought, one, it was a bit shorter than ‘Aubrey Anderson-Emmons.’ I do have a long, hyphenated last name.”
The *Summer House* star shocked Bravo fans by revealing that his legally given first name isn’t actually Carl. “My I.D. and my passport—my first name is William,” Carl, who has appeared on the reality show for all nine seasons, told PopViewers in August 2025. “So, my middle name is Carl, but I’ve always, since day one, been called Carl.”
Sterling K. Brown went by his middle name Kelby until he was a teenager. “My dad’s name is Sterling Brown Jr., my grandfather is Sterling Brown Sr.,” he said during an April 2025 appearance on *The Kelly Clarkson Show*. “I wanted my own name and it felt like Sterling was an old man’s name.” But years after his dad died from a heart attack, the *This Is Us* alum decided to revert back to his first name as a way to honor his father.
“Because he passed away when I was 10, by the time I turned 16 and I hadn’t heard his name for five, five-and-a-half years,” he continued, “I was like, ‘I kinda just want to hear that name again.’ So I asked people to call me Sterling.”
Kat Dennings adopted a stage name at age 9, years before she made her official onstage acting debut on a 2000 episode of *Sex and the City*. The *2 Broke Girls* alum told Kylie Kelce on the March 13, 2025 episode of her podcast *Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce* that she didn’t think her real name should “be displayed on a poster.”
The actress drew inspiration for her stage name from Christina Ricci’s character Kat in the film *Casper* as well as the surname of Janine Denni, the French wife of late *The Black Cauldron* author Lloyd Alexander—a writer she said was her mother’s best friend.
For more than three decades, Cher was made to believe that her legal first name was Cherilyn. It wasn’t until the late ’70s, when she obtained her birth certificate in order to change her full name to just Cher, that she discovered she had been registered as “Cheryl.” In her 2024 memoir, *Cher: The Memoir, Part One*, the pop icon recalled her mom Georgia Holt’s reaction to this discovery.
She said her mother, who gave birth to her at age 19, responded, “Let me look at that!” and then, recalling her postpartum experience, added, “I was only a teenager, and I was in a lot of pain. Give me a break.”
Shania Twain shared the origin story of her stage name during an appearance on Apple Music’s *Home Now Radio*:
“In short, I was born Eilleen Regina Edwards, and then I was adopted and I became Eilleen Regina Twain. Then I became a professional singer and I needed a stage name that sounded a little less like my grandmother’s name, because I’m named after my grandmother, both my grandmothers, Eilleen and Regina. I think, in my mind, I was just not really wanting to be called my grandmother’s name onstage, so I decided to change it to Shania Twain. I met somebody with the name Shania, thought it was beautiful, and Shania Twain was born.”
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