These celebrity kids are cruising into a new chapter of life. Without their parents well-known names.
Take, for instance, how Barack Obama and Michelle Obama‘s daughter Malia Obama distanced herself from her family name for a project, choosing to call herself Malia Ann when she debuted her film The Heart at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
“I was all like, ‘You do know they’ll know who you are,'” her dad said last October of the warning her gave Malia. “And she’s all like, ‘You know what? I want them to watch it that first time and not in any way have that association.’ So I think our daughters go out of their way to not try to leverage that.”
Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise‘s daughter Suri Cruise also revealed last year that she’s going by a new name, dropping her dad’s stage name and instead using Suri Noelle (an homage to her mom’s middle name) at her high school graduation.
And she and Malia are far from the only ones to make a change to their surname after reaching adulthood.
