When it comes to celebrity baby names, it’s the weirder the better, in my humble opinion. From O.G. weirdos like Moon Unit Zappa to the advent of Apple Martin all the way up to recent bizarro-name births such as Onyx, Dessert, and X Æ A-12, we say: Keep on bringing us the creative baby names, Hollywood! But perhaps even more entertaining than the name selections of the Hollywood (and Broadway, and reality-TV etc.) elite are the true tall tales behind those baby name choices — their real meanings, and their often really weird origin stories.
Sure, some celebs go the straightforward route and name their kids after a deceased family member or an esteemed artist the family loves. But some take decidedly more roundabout routes on the baby-name-selection highway. Can you guess which celeb admits to stealing their baby name outright? Which one sourced theirs from Twitter? Which fashion blogger plucked her daughter’s middle name from…Star Wars? Which actor says her son was dubbed after the song her partner cued up mid-childbirth, “as I was cuing him out of my vagina”? Which names (yes, multiple!) came to various celeb parents via dreams? Which star’s baby boy name was a message to the universe in hopes of turning 2020 around? Or how about which TV star’s wife insists the name was silently “whispered in her ear” by a strange spirit presence?! It just gets wackier and wackier folks, and we are so very here for it.
Over the past few months, SheKnows has spoken exclusively with the likes of Shay Mitchell, Hilaria Baldwin, Jason Biggs, Laura Prepon, Ellie Kemper and many more celebs we love in order to get — straight from the uber-talented horse’s mouth, if you will — the real stories of how they and their partners chose their baby names. We’ve got some real doozies ahead, so brace yourselves.
Stanley Tucci & Felicity Blunt
“My wife loved the name Matteo,” The Witches actor Stanley Tucci told SheKnows Entertainment Writer Louisa Ballhaus. But Tucci admitted he wasn’t immediately on board with the name for his son with wife Felicity Blunt. “I didn’t want to name him Mateo; I wanted to name him Oliver… My father-in-law is Oliver and I always loved that name. So his middle name is Oliver.”
As for the couple’s daughter’s name? “Emilia is the Italian version of Emily,” Tucci explained, likely referring to his wife’s famous sister, Emily Blunt. “And I had a a great Aunt Emilia.” Can’t go wrong with naming kids after loved ones.
Alec & Hilaria Baldwin
“The first names of my kids, some are family names from my side, but for first names our real formula is just that we like the name,” Hilaria Baldwin told me after welcoming baby Eduardo Pao Lucas Baldwin, her fifth child with husband Alec Baldwin. “For their second, or second and third — because our last three have three names — come from my family. And then the last name is Alec’s family. That’s our formula. Eduardo was going to be Carmen’s name if she was a boy; I had a family friend growing up who passed away named Eduardo, so some of my friends and I talked about naming our sons Eduardo after him. So when we had our fourth boy in a row, we were like, Eduardo!”
As for the little guy’s melodic middle names, “Pao means peace in Catalan,” Baldwin explained. “My family lives in Majorca, where they speak Spanish as well as Catalan. And Lucas is one of my brothers’ names and means light. After having so many boys you start to run out of names. So he’s ‘wealthy guardian of peace and light’! It’s like, 2020, turn us around, bring me some namaste!”
Shay Mitchell
Pretty Little Liars and You star Shay Mitchell told SheKnows Deputy Editor Erika Janes that she’s not ashamed to have mostly stolen the name of her daughter Atlas Noa. “Good friends of ours had just recently had a daughter themselves, and so they were calling us like, ‘Hey, what you guys think about these names?’ They went through a list,” Mitchell explained. “And as soon as I heard her say Atlas I was like, ping! I looked at [partner Matte Babel]. He was like, ping! I’m like, this is perfect. And I’m like, ‘You should go with the other one!’ And then she ended up going with a different name, which is actually perfectly suited for her daughter, and we took the name Atlas.”
What about Atlas’ middle name, Noa? “Noa was something that I actually randomly saw on Twitter.”
Justin Baldoni
Jane the Virgin star Justin Baldoni told SheKnows Parenting Writer Sabrina Rojas Weiss that both his daughter’s and his son’s names may well be the product of divine intervention: “Maiya came to my wife in a dream,” he explained. “Basically we were trying to figure out the name, and she had a dream, and she kind of felt the presence of a female ancestor or it could have been her grandmother…this presence, you know. She wanted to find a strong name that felt kind of feminine and powerful and also kind of ancient. And there was basically a list…of names. And this this woman in her dream pointed to one, and it was Maya. And so she woke up and was like, ‘Baby, what about Maya?'”
Baldoni admits they tweaked it a bit: “We actually changed the spelling; we put an ‘I’ in there afterwards,” he explained.
And what about his son Maxwell? Baldoni told SheKnows he “wanted to play around with an idea of a name that had to do with the history of the Bahai faith in some way. But we didn’t have any ideas. And then it was almost like somebody whispered it in her ear, and she just literally said, Maxwell. And she’s like, ‘I don’t know where that came from, but I think that’s the name of our son. And I said, ‘Baby, yes.’ And it turns out that Maxwell is actually a very famous Bahai name. And she actually didn’t even know she knew that. So it was a very spiritual kind of moment where…something whispered in her ear to name our son Maxwell.”
Allison Holker & Stephen tWitch Boss
Dancing With the Stars favorites Allison Holker and Stephen tWitch Boss are raising a beautiful blended family with some hella cool kids names: Weslie Fowler, Maddox Laurel Boss, and Zaia Boss. And it appears Holker is right there with Justin Baldoni on the psychic baby name knowledge; she told SheKnows recently that all her kids names just came to her while she was asleep. “I feel like all my children have told me their names,” she explained. “The names have always come to me in a dream.”
Jason Biggs & Jenny Mollen
In February, Jason Biggs arrived for our interview having sneakily pre-Googled me — and my son, Silas.
“I love the name Silas,” Biggs said. “It’s funny because I’m thinking about Silas now and I don’t think that name was ever on our radar.” So how did Biggs and wife Jenny Mollen choose another “Si-” name, Sid, for their son?
“We actually had another name for Sid in mind through Jenny’s whole pregnancy,” Biggs explained. “But when he was born we were like, nope, that’s not his name. We were in the hospital, and we landed on wanting an ‘S’ name, and we wanted one syllable — we thought it sounded stronger that way. It was Jenny’s idea; Jenny was like, ‘What about just Sid?’ And Sid Caesar had just died, and I was a Sid Caesar fan, meanwhile Jenny liked the Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious. We also just liked how Sid Biggs sounded like an elegant older man.”
It really does, doesn’t it? Then, I asked him how they chose Lazlo for their second son — and it seems team Biggs-Mollen, like Shay Mitchell, is not above a good ol’ name theft.
“Lazlo, we honestly stole that from a kid in Sid’s school whose brother was named Lazlo. We only know it because one day he was visiting and we saw his backpack and it said his name on it. And we were like damn, that’s a great name. So we stole it.”
Laura Prepon
“Originally we were going to name her Elliott,” actor, author, mom of two and SHE Media BlogHer keynote Laura Prepon told SheKnows Parenting Writer Sabrina Rojas Weiss of her daughter. “At my house in Los Angeles, I have these two elephant statues outside of it that protected the house. And there’s all these different wonderful beliefs about, you know, the significance of elephants. But I’ve always been drawn to elephants and so has my husband. So it basically just went from Elliott and then just kind of through our own childhood experiences loving elephants and what they represent. Then it kind of just became Ella. And at a certain point, you just kind of know. The name kind of just becomes super clear… And she’s such an Ella.”
Arielle Charnas
“Coming up with their names was pretty easy,” Something Navy blogger Arielle Charnas told me of her two daughters, Esme Rae and Ruby Lou. “They just came to us and we both loved them. But for Ruby my list did have a bunch of those kind of crazy names on it, until I realized, I just can’t.”
I asked if the weirdest option on her potential-baby-names list was the name of a fruit.
“It was not a fruit, no,” Charnas laughed. “I can’t say because I have friends who have named their kids those names! But there are a lot of names I wanted that I’m glad I didn’t choose in the end. So we went with Ruby; Brandon picked that first name. I had wanted her first name to be Lou, but we got nervous giving her a boyish name not knowing her personality. We decided to go girly with her first name and name her Ruby Lou. And then, the best part was what we realized later: We’re Jewish, and in our religion you’re supposed to name after the dead — dead grandparents or whoever. We felt kind of guilty we weren’t doing that. But after we named her Ruby Lou, we realized it was a complete combination of all our living grandmothers: Ruth, Beatrice, and Lucille. How weird is that?
“Esme Rae we chose because I wanted something feminine but different; we liked the idea of keeping it in the jewel family, and even though Esme isn’t a jewel it comes from Esmerelda which means Emerald. So we liked that connection. And Rae, well, my husband was absolutely obsessed with the new Star Wars movie! And there’s a girl named Rey in it, so that’s where that came from, believe it or not.”
Ellie Kemper
In July, The Office and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star Ellie Kemper told me why she chose the name James for her son: “It’s a very dignified, timeless name, but it also happened to be the name of my own grandfather. It’s always nice when it aligns with a family name. And so far he’s just James, no nicknames — except I guess Jamesy.”
As for her second son?
“The baby’s name is Matthew,” Kemper told me. “James, we had decided his name way ahead of time; Matthew we were definitely in the hospital. I couldn’t believe it was the morning we were going home and we were still going over the name. And he’s Matthew, not Matt, for now. They’re traditional sorts of names, some might say boring, but unobjectionable! I mean, I’ve never met a Matthew I didn’t like.”
Leah Messer
When I spoke with Teen Mom star Leah Messer this year, she explained the alliterative origins of her three daughters’ names: “I named them so perfectly, and had no idea,” she told me. “Ali was baby A and Aleeah was baby B. We were going to name Ali ‘Ali Jean’ for the longest time because it was my great grandma’s middle name, and last-minute we were like, no, her middle name should be Hope. Aleeah was named after me… Addie, we wanted to call her Addie but didn’t want that to be her name. I would just be creative with it; Jeremy’s middle name is Lynn and his dad’s middle is Lynn, so we went with Adalynn. And their middle names are Hope, Faith and Grace.”
Katie Lowes
When I chatted with Scandal actor Katie Lowes this summer, I kinda-sorta jokingly asked if she had named her baby son Albee after Edward Albee like a huge theater dork. I was correct.
“Yes! We’re huge theater nerds,” she replied. “But he’s actually named after two Alberts, plus Grandma Edna and Grandma Elsie. One grandpa is an Albert, and a great-uncle is an Albert who’s like a grandfather figure to us. Edward Albee we absolutely love, and we’re theater dorks. Also he was born to ‘Call Me Al,’ my husband cued it up perfectly as soon as I was cuing him out of my vagina.” Can’t beat that.
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