It’s more than common for celebrities to take stage names, and just this week Millie Bobby Brown revealed that she altered her real name for her professional career. So here are just 13 celebrities, including Millie, whose real name just might fascinate you:
Millie Bobby Brown’s middle name isn’t Bobby. It’s Bonnie. “I’ve never told anyone that. You heard it here first,” she told BuzzFeed UK earlier this month. She said she changed her middle name for “shits and giggles.”
Emma Stone’s real name is Emily Stone. Another actor was already registered under the name with the Screen Actors Guild, so the Kinds of Kindness star chose the first name “Emma” and kept her last name. In 2024, she told the Hollywood Reporter that she “freaked out” a few years ago about her stage name and realized she couldn’t “do it anymore.” When asked by the publication if her fans could call her Emily, she said, “That would be so nice. I would like to be Emily.”
Jamie Foxx’s real name is Eric Marlon Bishop. “I went on as Eric Bishop [and] killed. Standing ovation,” Jamie said on Angie Martinez’s radio show last year of his early days doing stand-up in Los Angeles. “I come back the next weekend. You sign your name. I don’t get on. Next week, I don’t get on again. Come to find out, the comics are running the list. So I could never get on.” He then tried out a different comedy hall, where he had more success by writing down “unisex names” because the number of male comics far outweighed the number of female comics. One of the names he tried out was Jamie Foxx. It got him on stage, and he stuck with it.
Michelle Yeoh’s Chinese name is Yeoh Choo-Kheng. However, she told USA Today that she adopted the more Anglican name “Michelle” at the start of her career when a producer questioned her name. “I only adopted the name Michelle when I got into the film industry, because my producer said at the time, ‘No one is going to be able to say your name,'” she told USA Today in 2021. “What do you mean they can’t say it? It’s Yeoh as in Yo, that’s easy right? Choo as in ‘choo choo train’ and Kheng as in ‘king.’ Why can’t you put those three words together?”
Michael Keaton’s real name is Michael Douglas. As you can imagine, he couldn’t use his real name as his stage name, considering there’s already a major movie star named Michael Douglas. He told People last year that he thinks he found the name “Keaton” while looking through a phone book. “I must’ve gone, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something here.’ And I went, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable,'” he said.
Whoopi Goldberg’s real name is Caryn Johnson. But Whoopi Goldberg was the first stage name she tried. “Here’s the thing. When you’re performing on stage, you never really have time to go into the bathroom and close the door. So if you get a little gassy, you’ve got to let it go. So people used to say to me, You are like a whoopee cushion. And that’s where the name came from,” she told the New York Times in 2006. She said on Late Night last year that her mom convinced her to evolve the name beyond Whoopee Cushion to Whoopi Goldberg. Briefly, between the two names, she went by a French pronunciation of Whoopee Cushion.
As a kid, Will Ferrell was “embarrassed” by his first name: John. “This is a minor thing in terms of — it’s not really even trauma — but I remember feeling so embarrassed because my real name is John. John William Ferrell. So first day of school, I’d be John,” he said on Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s MeSsy podcast last year. As for why he went by his middle? Well, that’s because it’s the name his parents called him. “It wasn’t my choice,” he said. “My parents named me John. They called me Will. I grew up as Will.”
Kids who grew up on Disney Channel might already know the lore of Miley Cryus’s real name: Destiny Hope Cyrus. Growing up, her family called her “Smiley” since she radiated happiness. This was eventually shortened to Miley. “It is lovely. It is a lot,” Miley said of her birth name on David Letterman’s Netflix talk show last year, per TODAY. “But I do think that from the beginning it set an intention, which we don’t always have.”
“For those who may be curious, the name I was born with is 김대현, pronounced ‘Geem Day Hyun.’ (If you know the car company Hyundai just switch the syllables. 🙂 Like many other Asian immigrants, when my family came to the US my parents added a western name to make it easier for non-Koreans to pronounce. The name they chose was ‘Daniel’ because they liked the meaning and the fact that the ‘D’ sound in Daniel was the same as my first name in Korean, Dae Hyun. Both my names represent the best of who I am as a Korean and an American. I couldn’t be prouder to be both. 🇺🇸🇰🇷,” he wrote on Instagram in 2022.
Tina Fey’s real name is Elizabeth Stamatina Fey. According to Vogue, Tina comes from her middle name. Come to think of it, what’s the name of Tina’s 30 Rock character? Liz Lemon. Liz, short for Elizabeth. You see the connection…
“When people call me Robyn, my head just flies around because I feel like that person knows me,” Rihanna told Glamour in 2013. The singer and beauty mogul’s full name is Robyn Rihanna Fenty. “But Rihanna, that tends to be people’s own [creation]. Robyn is who I am. Rihanna — that’s an idea of who I am.”
Reese isn’t the actor’s first name. Reese’s real name is Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon. She revealed this in an interview on Ellen in 2004.