NEED TO KNOW
- Kat Dennings is sharing how she decorated her childhood bedroom with photos of her celebrity crushes
- Dennings said that, as a child, she lived in the attic of her family’s rural Pennsylvania home, a historic structure built in 1695
- The house, she added, was haunted, saying, “There were the classics like, you know, lights turning on and off, doors opening and closing”
Kat Dennings is opening up about her unconventional childhood bedroom — and how she decorated it.
Dennings, 39, spoke to Danielle Fishel on the Wednesday, Jan. 28 episode of her Teen Beat podcast, sharing that, as a child, she lived in the attic of her family’s rural Pennsylvania home, a historic structure built in 1695 — which she insisted “was haunted.”
“There were the classics like, you know, lights turning on and off, doors opening and closing…. I saw that s—. There were, like, places on the stairs that were ice cold,” the Shifting Gears actress shared.
“I, of course, lived in the attic,” she added, admitting that it was “very creepy.”
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Dennings added that, as a young actress, she would travel to New York for auditions, and always stopped by a newsstand to get art for her bedroom walls before returning home.
“Every time I’d go to New York for an audition, I would go to… Hudson News and pick up a Teen Beat [or] Tiger Beat, most of which you were in,” Dennings recalled, nodding to Fishel, who often appeared in the magazines during her time as Topanga on Boy Meets World.
“I would tear out the Jonathan Taylor Thomases, and I would tear out the Hansons, and I would paper my room with these things,” she said.
The actress added that she had a Hanson “stand-up,” or a cutout of the band, that she also kept in her attic bedroom, which she got at now-defunct retailer Sam Goody after seeing it on display.
“They gave it to me. I think they took pity on me, or they were scared, which I would understand,” Dennings joked. “So I made this terrifying haunted house my own. Let’s just say that.”
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Dennings started acting professionally around the year 2000 after being cast in Sex and the City when she was around 14.
In January 2025, Dennings spoke to PEOPLE about her experience in the industry as a tween, noting that she dealt with horrible comments about her appearance.
“The time that I was auditioning and starting to act, it was a very different environment than it is now,” she said at the time. “There was not a lot of inclusivity at all. It was very harsh. There was a lot of extremely negative feedback and people would not hold back.”
She added that casting directors could be “very cruel,” saying, “For example, I was 12. I’d go into an audition and I’d do it, and my manager would call me and I’d be like, ‘How’d it go?’ And they’d be like, ‘Well, they thought you weren’t pretty enough and you’re fat.’ ”
But the comments, Dennings said, “didn’t break my spirit.”
“I was like, ‘I’ll show them,’ ” she shared. “I guess props to my parents, because they were like, ‘They’re idiots. Don’t listen to them.’ And I was like, ‘They’re idiots, I’m not.’ “
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