Plenty of celebrities’ children are famous in their own right, but growing up, many of them wished they could be anywhere but the spotlight.Here are 15 kids of celebrities who low-key resented their parents’ fame:1. In 2026, Dan Levy, the son of Eugene Levy and Deborah Divine, told Q with Tom Power that he “hated” having a famous dad growing up. He said, “I hated it. It caused some pain in my relationship with my dad. When you are a closeted person who is repressing parts of yourself and is feeling incredibly insecure about who you are and the space you take up in the world, the last thing you want is for people to be staring. The attention that we would get every time we left the house was incredibly uncomfortable for me. I started to distance myself from being with him in public.”
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Thankfully, Dan and his dad had a heart-to-heart about why he felt the need to distance himself. He said, “I saw it as a necessity to keep myself feeling comfortable in the world as someone who was not comfortable in the world. And we had that conversation, and it was important for us to have that clarity. I think it was really important for him to understand why I acted the way I did for so long. … I think I was too young to even explain that it made me uncomfortable. I just didn’t want to do things. Baseball games? Absolutely not. Way too many eyes. Restaurants, a lot of eyes. So I would opt out of that. And somehow I still had a desire to perform.”
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2. Aimée Osbourne, the oldest child of Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, famously did not appear on her famous family’s ’00s reality show, The Osbournes. In 2020, she told Q1043 New York, “For me, I had grown up around having a pretty well-known dad anyway, and…I always really valued my privacy within that family. And for me personally, and for who I am, you know, as far as morally and also just to give myself a chance to actually develop into a human being as opposed to just being remembered for being a teenager, it didn’t really line up with what I saw my future as. It definitely worked great for the rest of my family, but for me, and who I am, I just knew it was never something that I would have been able to consider realistically.”
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Aimée was so serious about her decision that she moved out of her parents’ house at 16 to avoid the cameras. On a 2018 episode of The Talk, Sharon said, “I know that my eldest girl, Aimée, left home at 16, and she couldn’t live in our house because we were filming, and it drove her insane. She felt, too, that she didn’t want to grow up on camera. She hated the idea — it was appalling to her. And so she left at 16, and I regret every day that she did. She was happy, but it broke my heart when she moved.”
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3. In 2017, Willow Smith, the then-17-year-old daughter of Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith, told Girlgaze, “To be completely and utterly honest, [growing up famous is] absolutely terrible. … Growing up and trying to figure out your life…while people feel like they have some sort of entitlement to know what’s going on, is absolutely, excruciatingly terrible — and the only way to get over it, is to go into it.”
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She continued, “You can’t change your face. You can’t change your parents. You can’t change any of those things. So I feel like most kids like me end up going down a spiral of depression, and the world is sitting there looking at them through their phones, laughing and making jokes and making memes at the crippling effect that this lifestyle has on the psyche. When you’re born into it, there are two choices that you have; I’m either going to try to go into it completely and help from the inside, or…I’m really going to take myself completely out of the eye of society. There’s really no in-between.”
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4. In 2026, amid rumors of a family feud, Brooklyn Peltz Beckham called out his parents, Victoria and David Beckham, on his Instagram stories. In a series of posts, he said, “I have been silent for years and made every effort to keep these matters private. Unfortunately, my parents and their team have continued to go to the press, leaving me with no choice but to speak for myself and tell the truth about only some of the lies that have been printed. I do not want to reconcile with my family. I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life.”
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He continued, “For my entire life, my parents have controlled narratives in the press about our family. The performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships have been a fixture of the life I was born into. Recently, I have seen with my own eyes the lengths that they’ll go through to place countless lies in the media, mostly at the expense of innocent people, to preserve their own facade. But I believe the truth always comes out. My parents have been trying endlessly to ruin my relationship [with wife Nicola Peltz Beckham] since before my wedding, and it hasn’t stopped. My mum cancelled making Nicola’s dress in the eleventh hour despite how excited she was to wear her design, forcing her to urgently find a new dress.”
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“Weeks before our big day, my parents repeatedly pressured and attempted to bribe me into signing away the rights to my name, which would have affected me, my wife, and our future children. They were adamant on me signing before my wedding date because then the terms of the deal would be initiated. My holdout affected the payday, and they have never treated me the same since… My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else. Brand Beckham comes first. Family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media, or how quickly you drop everything to show up and pose for a family photo opp, even if it’s at the expense of our professional obligations. We’ve gone out of our way for years to show up and support at every fashion show, every party, and every press activity to show ‘our perfect family.’ But the one time my wife asked for my mum’s support to save displaced dogs during the LA fires, my mum refused,” he claimed.
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5. Chet Hanks is the oldest son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson (he has two older half-siblings). In a since-privated 2022 YouTube video titled “The Truth About Growing Up As A Hanks,” he said, “My experience was even more complicated because on top of fame already being toxic, I wasn’t even famous. I was just the son of somebody famous, so I hadn’t even done anything to deserve any sort of recognition, and that created a lot of contempt. People would make up their minds about me before they even got the chance to know me, and it was extremely hard to break down their walls.”
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“I was just a little rich kid in this sheltered, protected bubble, and I didn’t experience ****. … I was deeply insecure and ashamed of my upbringing. … I felt like a little ******’ ***** rich kid that had never gone through ****, who didn’t deserve to be in this position, who internalized all the shame projected onto me, who created more and more of this within myself. And that’s what led me to, once I got older, to go about as far in the opposite direction of my upbringing as I could go. ‘Cause I feel like I had to make up for that, so I could be a man. That’s the truth. It’s not just anger, it’s shame, insecurity, self-consciousness,” he said.
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6. As the daughter of former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton spent the entirety of her teen years in the White House — and the public eye. In her 2022 docuseries Gutsy, she said, “I had a different experience with comedy in some ways than a lot of people, because I was made fun of so much as a child, by people who were professional comics.”
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She was able to let jokes from conservative pundits roll off her back because she knew they were more about her parents’ politics than her personally. However, getting mocked on Saturday Night Live was a different story. She said, “But when SNL made fun of me, I was like, ‘Wow, a group of adults sat in a room, all decided this was a good idea; nobody thought maybe we shouldn’t make fun of children.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I just don’t think that’s funny or OK, so I just don’t think comedy’s funny or OK.'”
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7. Brody Jenner is the youngest son of Caitlyn Jenner and Linda Thompson. After Caitlyn got remarried to Kris Jenner, she “wasn’t around that much.” On a 2025 episode of Special Forces, Brody said that, regarding Caitlyn and her new family starring on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, he felt “to be honest, a little bit abandoned.”
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He added, “I will say [Caitlyn] was going through [her] own struggles, transitioning, and it was all that was put on TV, and there were these moments that we would have that was all filmed, and it just felt very invasive and not very genuine, I would say. Just recently, I got a real, sincere apology. It was the first time in my life that I’ve ever gotten an apology. You know, ‘I’m sorry for not being there,’ and honestly, it meant a lot.”
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8. Growing up, Rumer Willis struggled to see her own natural beauty and was bullied for looking more like her dad, Bruce Willis, than her mom, Demi Moore. On a 2015 episode of Dancing with the Stars, she said, “People would say I looked like a man or something called a ‘buttaface,’ which means everything good but her face, or ‘potato head’ was the big term that everyone used a lot, basically making fun of the way I looked. My mom, who is one of the most stunning women I’ve ever met and who everyone was comparing me to, saying that you look more like your very masculine father than your beautiful mom. For years I thought, ‘Maybe I can get plastic surgery. If I change my face or get really skinny, that will be it, that will be the answer’ and it’s not.”
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She continued, “When you grow up with parents that are known worldwide and having so much attention from media and all of the tabloid magazines, it’s really tough. When I was a teenager, I was super awkward. I don’t think I really felt comfortable in my body or with how I looked. and people were nasty.”
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9. Jennifer Aniston is the daughter of actors Nancy Dow and John Aniston. In 2018, she told the Sunday Telegraph, “One of the reasons I really loved the mother-daughter aspect of [Dumplin’] was because it was very similar in a way to what my mother, and our relationship, was. She was a model, and she was all about presentation and what she looked like and what I looked like. I did not come out the model child she’d hoped for, and it was something that really resonated with me, this little girl just wanting to be seen and wanting to be loved by a [mom] who was too occupied with things that didn’t quite matter.”
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10. In 2025, Dakota Johnson, who’s the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, told Vogue Germany, “When I was little, there were times when it was really quite frightening, and people would aggressively and physically try to get to my mom when we were just going to the supermarket or something. If you accept that as normal as a young child, it can lead to a lot of insecurities. And then, of course, there’s the fact that you’re in the public eye, and the world knows about your private life in a way that’s very invasive, outrageous, and painful. So yes, there are downsides, but there are also incredible advantages — like with everything, I think.”
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11. Patrick Schwarzenegger is the oldest son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver. In 2025, he told the Times, “I know there are people who’ll say I only got this role [in White Lotus] because of who my dad is. They’re not seeing that I’ve had ten years of acting classes, put on [high] school plays every week, worked on my characters for hours on end, or the hundreds of rejected auditions I’ve been on. Of course, it’s frustrating, and you can get boxed in, and you think at that moment, ‘I wish I didn’t have my last name.’ But that’s a small moment. I would never trade my life with anyone. I’m very fortunate to have the life and family that I have, the parents I have, and the lessons and values they’ve instilled in me.”
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12. Elle King is the daughter of former Saturday Night Live cast member Rob Schneider and model London King, but as she grew up, her famous father was largely absent from her life. In 2023, she told People, “I was the chubby girl with a dad that didn’t visit very often, and everybody made fun of me and were mean to me about it. … Growing up as somebody who was chubby, awkward, funny, has OCD and is weird and quirky and awkward but super sensitive, I had to really fight to be OK as myself. So I didn’t want to be known as someone’s kid. I wanted to be my own person. I never wanted to borrow money from anybody, and I’ve worked hard for my family and for me. I want to have a life built for myself, and I want to know that I did it.”
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She also said, “It’s an incredible amount of pressure to be in a shadow. I mean, God forbid you’re good at something that happens and maybe was passed down in your family. My dad is a wonderful singer. It doesn’t take away from my abilities that my dad sings. My showmanship and my stage presence? Sure, I grew up watching my dad. My dad can totally command a theater or a small comedy club. And I grew up around really funny, talented, creative people. Of course that’s going to leave an imprint on me.”
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13. In 2015, Frances Bean Cobain, the daughter of the late Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, told Rolling Stone, “I don’t really like Nirvana that much. Sorry, promotional people, Universal. I’m more into Mercury Rev, Oasis, Brian Jonestown Massacre. The grunge scene is not what I’m interested in. … I would have felt more awkward if I’d been a fan. I was around 15 when I realized he was inescapable. Even if I was in a car and had the radio on, there’s my dad. He’s larger than life, and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians. We love to put them on a pedestal.”
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She continued, “If Kurt had just been another guy who abandoned his family in the most awful way possible… But he wasn’t. He inspired people to put him on a pedestal, to become St. Kurt. He became even bigger after he died than he was when he was alive. You don’t think it could have gotten any bigger. But it did.”
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14. The late Jeff Buckley was the son of musician Tim Buckley, but, as Jeff told the New York Times, he “never knew him.” He said, “I met him once, when I was 8. We went to visit him, and he was working in his room, so I didn’t even get to talk to him. And that was it.” Two months after they met, Tim died of an overdose, and Jeff wasn’t at the funeral or in the obituary. When Jeff grew up, Tim’s former manager invited him to perform at a tribute concert, which became his big break.
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Jeff told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “In a way, I sacrificed my anonymity for my father, whereas he sacrificed me for his fame. So I guess I made a mistake.”
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15. And finally, the late Frank Sinatra Jr. was the son of (obviously) Frank Sinatra and Nancy Barbato Sinatra. At 19, he’d just started his own music career when he was kidnapped. His dad paid the reportedly $240,000 ransom. Though the kidnappers were convicted and jailed, rumors persisted that the Sinatras staged the kidnapping to boost Frank Jr.’s career. In 2012, he told the Guardian, “The criminals invented a story that the whole thing was phoney. That was the stigma put on me.”
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He said, “At first I felt like I was living in his shadow, but I did develop my own following eventually, so I must have been doing something right. … My lack of success does not trouble me at this stage in my life, no. When I was younger, sure, I wanted to have some degree of, shall we say, identity. But it never came.”
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