Bryn Mawr's Kat Dennings: 'A child of the forest'
An unconventional upbringing brings Kat Dennings to one of the fall's most promising new shows.
Kat Dennings brings her alt vibe to CBS's 2 Broke Girls, the best new fall sitcom, where she plays a perennially penniless waitress opposite Beth Behrs' newly bankrupted socialite. Her first paid acting gig outside of commercials, at age 14, was for executive producer Michael Patrick King in a episode, "Hot Child in the City," on Sex and the City. She played a girl at a bar mitzvah who got involved in a little oral sex. (Ain't premium cable grand?)
"It changed my life," Dennings told the critics Wednesday. "Really it did. I was a home-schooled kid living in the forest, and I didn't even have cable."
It was a civilized forest, in Bryn Mawr, but Dennings has a wonderful way with words.
"I'm serious. We had to get cable to watch that episode. So all my little home-schooled friends and their moms saw Kyle MacLachlan's ass. ..."
"Part of the reason why I relate to [2 Broke Girls] so much is because we didn't have any money when I was growing up, and I used to get all my films from the library. My mom would get me classic movies and stuff. And I actually wasn't allowed to watch TV as a kid growing up except for, like, PBS, Sesame Street.
So sheltered was she, she said, that she had to ask S&TC's Kim Cattrall what oral sex (or at least a more vulgar term for same) was.
"She was an innocent woodland creature," King said, "magical and mysterious, like a sexy hobbit, when we discovered her."
"It kind of came out of nowhere," Denning said. "I would watch these films, and ... I guess I just took that little-kid-wanting-to-be-a-movie-star thing way too far and actually ended up doing it. My brother's friend, weirdly, from karate was on Pete & Pete [a Nickelodeon show] sometimes. And I met his manager, and she sent me on auditions in Philly and then in New York. And then I would just start getting commercials, and then when I got the Sex and the City, it just changed the things I was able to get.
She was home-schooled, she said, because her parents were disenchanted with the public schools. "I was also kind of a weirdo. ... So I'm an actor now. And all that weirdness, growing up, just somehow worked."