For the most part, celebrities aren’t born with names that scream “superstar”: they have to craft it themselves. Eliza Janssen judges whether today’s biggest actors should stay quirky, or go back to the names their mamas gave them.
Frances Ethel Gumm, Marion Morrison, and Edda Van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston are some of the greatest movie stars of all time: you just wouldn’t know it from hearing the quaint names they were doled out at birth. At some point in their celebrity trajectories, Judy Garland, John Wayne, and Audrey Hepburn each abandoned their inherited names for more streamlined, marquee-friendly monikers—sleek brands that the public could, and did, get behind.
In today’s complex celebrity era, where studios rarely pick a pretty face out of a rural chorus line and rocket them to suffocatingly-contracted superstardom anymore, we’re facing a somewhat weirder situation. When viral YouTube rapper Awkafina and chart-topping pop diva Lady Gaga get nominated for Golden Globes, their showbiz names stand out like a sore thumb amongst the Meryls and Cates. Dwayne Johnson’s Wikipedia page bounces back and forth between describing “Johnson’s” action movie achievements and “The Rock’s” Smackdown victories, blurring the kayfabe between performer and character.
Are we dealing with the opposite issue these days: of crossover pop culture icons getting saddled with their wacky stage personae, and being unable to headline a blockbuster as simply Dwayne, or Nora, or Stefani? It’s a case-by-case problem, of course, so let’s delve into whether any of these weirdly-titled movie stars should make the jump to normie names.
One sad reason that a celebrity might change their name to make it in Hollywood lies in the industry’s eternal racism. A casting director might’ve been more hesitant to see “Jennifer Anastassakis” show up in Friends’ opening credits: Vera Mindy Chokalingam could’ve had a harder time making it onto The Office than Mindy Kaling did. A Harvard study has shown that resumes with conspicuously Caucasian names go further in job interviews, proven when Black-coded names like Aaliyah and DeShawn performed worse than names like Connor and Amy when all applicants had the same qualifications. Natalie Portman has explained that her family initially chose to forgo her birth name to protect her privacy as a child actor…but it’s also possible that the Israeli name Nita-Lee Hershlag wouldn’t have caught on in quite the same way.
Gaga, meanwhile, has been hilariously explicit about being “an Italian girl from New York/so I’m Italian/actually I’m fully Italian”, and her striking royal-space-baby showbiz name perfectly encapsulates the post-human pop image she brings to everything from music videos to the Super Bowl to the big screen. After being credited as Stefani Germanotta for an early teen role in The Sopranos’ third season, she’s gone Gaga all the way—and with four Oscar noms now under her belt, there’s probably no turning back.
We can’t quite say the same for Awkwafina, birth name Nora Lum. Despite proving her dramatic chops in The Farewell and a few Marvel/Disney productions, she’s not at the same globe-dominating level of fame as Gaga, and still has time to rethink her awkward random XD mononym. Can we really expect a charismatic young star to ascend through Hollywood while referring to them via an “adorkable” pun on PepsiCo bottled water products? Lum’s semi-autobiographical series Nora From Queens suggests a desire to reveal an authentic girl-next-door side that doesn’t match the idiosyncratic Awkwafina name, but then again, the star has said she’s “come to really be grateful for that name…I don’t think that I could shed her right now.”
Having put out a shocking 13 movies in the past five years, The Rock might simply be too busy to care whether you call him by his WWE character or by Dwayne. Today he says there’s “no rules”, but admits that at one time he “did feel that [he] wanted to be known as [Dwayne Johnson], and felt that it was just going to take time”. Honestly, Dwayne Johnson sounds like a chess club kid who gets wedgie’d and shoved in a locker by middle school bullies, rather than the buff, franchise-bolstering kinda badass who’s more likely to actually do the bullying. He joins co-stars Mark Sinclair (Vin Diesel) and Eric Marlon Bishop (Jamie Foxx) in rightfully levelling up to a bombastic, car-flipping cool guy name and leaving their dadly suburban titles in the dust. Bishop, Sinclair and Johnson just sounds like a personal injury law firm. Foxx! Diesel! The Rock! Hell yeah, brother!!
A one-of-a-kind name can usher a unique screen talent into the all-timer leagues: there’s only one Whoopi, only one Joaquin that comes to mind. It totally makes sense that Nicolas Kim Coppola would want to steal the name of superhero Luke Cage, forging his own path rather than fielding nepo baby discourse for being the nephew of Francis Ford—even if Sofia remains happy to represent the fam.
An extra weird situation arises when famous people have to change their names to avoid being linked to a same-named talent in their actor’s guild. Follow me down this rabbit hole for a minute: Michael J Fox’s middle name doesn’t even start with the letter “J’. He had to chuck it in there as SAG already had a member named Michael Fox, and using his actual “A” for Andrew didn’t sound right. (He was totally correct! Michael J Fox has the exact zippy, adventurous quality that the actor embodies.)
Fox made his start playing Alex P Keaton: Diane Keaton’s real surname, also changed to stand out from an existing guild member, is Hall. Which is weird since she played Annie Hall.
And Michael Keaton’s birth name is Michael Douglas.
And Michael Douglas’s dad’s real name isn’t even Kirk Douglas: he changed it from Issur Danielovitch, a name which would signal his distinctly Eastern-European migrant background to bigoted execs!!
So what the hell is in a name, as some guy asked back in the 16th century? We’ll probably always call the star of Black Adam some combo of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson—and always have to clarify, “you know, that funny girl from Crazy Rich Asians” to friends who don’t recognise the name Awkwafina. Maybe we can say that once Auto-Correct doesn’t show up with a red underline and a “look up the correct spelling of this wacky word” suggestion, your name is well and truly in lights. Come back to me when Æ A-12 Musk attempts an acting career and we’ll figure it out from there.
