12 Nepo Babies Who Have Been Open About The Downside Of Having Famous Parents

At the end of 2022, New York Magazine set the celebrity gossip world alight with its article diving into the world of nepo babies. Short for nepotism, the term "nepo baby" had taken off online that year, used by fans on social media to criticize celebrities who got a leg up in the entertainment business. After all, if you have famous parents with legions of fans and industry connections, it seems like it'd be much easier to make a name for yourself by relying on your well-known name.

"Suddenly, it felt like everywhere you looked, there was another child of a famous person booking a role," NY Mag's culture editor Gazelle Emami explained. "Of course, this was nothing new, but the internet had made nepotism funny." To talk to the actual nepo babies in question, however, their charmed lives are anything but.

Suddenly, nepo babies had to answer for their industry connections, explain themselves in the press, and elaborate why they'd truly earned their place in culture. While some nepo babies were all too happy to admit that they'd had it easier than their peers from less-famous families, plenty protested the term, insisting that they'd actually had to work harder to set themselves apart from their parents. Read on to learn about the downsides of having famous parents, according to nepo babies. 

Lisa Bonet made her name playing Denise Huxtable on "The Cosby Show," but she didn't stick with the sitcom until the end. The real reason Bonet left "The Cosby Show" was that she'd gotten pregnant after a whirlwind romance with rock musician Lenny Kravitz while starring on the spin-off show "A Different World." In Kravitz's memoir, "Let Love Rule" (via MovieWeb), he insisted that Bill Cosby had fired Bonet. "Lisa Bonet is pregnant, but Denise Huxtable is not," Cosby reportedly said.

Their daughter, Zoë Kravitz, grew up knowing her parents were mega-famous and that she'd have to earn her own way if she wanted a career in either of the industries they had conquered. In an interview with GQ, the star of "The Batman" revealed that the pressure had left her with severe insecurity about her talent. Every time she went on an audition, she was convinced she had no shot, although she landed early parts in films like "Mad Max Fury Road."

Now, though, Zoë reasons that she's doing nothing wrong by following in her parents' footsteps. "It's completely normal for people to be in the family business," she said. "It's literally where last names came from. You were a blacksmith if your family was, like, the Black family."

Emma Roberts' most controversial moments include accusations of domestic violence, rumors that she's unpleasant in person, and backlash from when she defended fellow nepo babies. The "American Horror Story" star is the daughter of Oscar nominee Eric Roberts, who's racked up an impressive list of credits. Even more so, he's also the brother of Julia Roberts, which makes Emma the niece of the acclaimed thespian. But if you bring up this connection, Emma is likely to tell you exactly why you shouldn't.

"People kind of only see your wins because they only see when you're on the poster of a movie," she pointed out on an episode of "Table for Two" (via The Los Angeles Times). "They don't see all the rejection along the way." Emma added that she feels like people write her off even though she's been working since she was a child, noting, "If you're not the girl from the middle of nowhere that broke into Hollywood, there's kind of an eye roll of like, 'Well, your dad was this.'"

The "Scream Queens" star pointed out that the nepo baby discourse tends to come down harder on women than men. "I don't think anyone should be called out wanting to follow their dreams," Emma clarified, before joking (via CNN), "Why is no one calling out George Clooney for being a nepo baby? Rosemary Clooney was an icon."

Willow Smith's parents are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, so it makes sense that she was positioned for stardom from a young age. When she was a child, her song "Whip My Hair" became a worldwide success, leading to a record deal with Roc Nation. Though Will was excited about his daughter embarking on a music career, Willow was less interested. 

In the documentary "Number One on the Call Sheet" (via Vice), the "King Richard" star recalled the moment he realized he was pushing his daughter too hard. After she tried to quit the tour one night, he told her they had to follow through. "[Willow] came out the next morning and she had shaved her head bald. In the middle of her Whip My Hair tour, she had shaved her head bald," Will recalled. "And it was like a magical moment. I was like, 'Got it.'"

Willow lives a glamorously lavish life these days, including a thriving music career now that she's an adult, but it's a life of her own choosing. The "Meet Me At Our Spot" singer has opened up about those early years many times, including in a 2017 interview with GirlGaze (via Marie Claire). "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 ..." she revealed. 

On "Schitt's Creek," Eugene Levy and Dan Levy play a father-son duo who come to respect each other over the course of the series. When the show begins, they're at odds, having lost the family fortune and forced to live in a motel together. By the end of the show, Dan's character, David, is a thriving business owner, making his father's character, Johnny, proud. Their arc mirrors the real-life relationship between Dan and Eugene Levy, who co-created the show. 

When Dan was younger, he resented that his father was a famous comedian, best known for roles like Jim's Dad in "American Pie." "It caused some pain in my relationship with my dad," Dan confessed on an episode of "Q with Tom Power". He explained that it was tough to grow up gay and closeted with a father like that, noting, "When you are a closeted person who is repressing parts of yourself and feeling incredibly insecure about who you are and the space you take up in the world ... The attention we would get every time we left the house was incredibly uncomfortable for me." 

Dan stopped spending so much time with Eugene in public, and it wasn't until later that he realized it had hurt his father, too. "He saw my distancing as a personal thing," Dan realized, reconsidering why his father took it personally when he didn't want to go to baseball games with him. Eventually, Dan said that Eugene understood, "I think I was too young to even explain that it made me uncomfortable."

For a while, it seemed like David Beckham and Victoria Beckham were positioning their eldest son, Brooklyn Beckham, to carry the mantle of their famous name. They shepherded their son through a series of attempts to step into public life, including explorations into soccer, photography, modeling, and cooking. That's one of the great things about being a nepo baby — you have the time, money, and supportive parents who let you figure out what you want to do with your life.

In early 2026, though, Brooklyn revealed the truth about Victoria's "inappropriate" dance at her son's wedding, and all bets were off. The Beckhams, it seems, have been embroiled in quite the family feud for a long time, much of it stemming from Brooklyn's anger at the way his parents have managed his every media appearance throughout his life.

In a series of Instagram Stories (via Buzzfeed), Brooklyn essentially confirmed all of the rumors that had been swirling about the family's apparent estrangement. "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." Brooklyn also said he had no interest in fixing things, and that he wanted nothing to do with parents who would lie to the press about him. "I'm standing up for myself for the first time in my life," he said.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson's decades-long love story is one of the most enviable relationships in Hollywood, so you'd be forgiven for thinking their family life was always pleasant for everyone involved. Tom's eldest son, Colin Hanks, is also an actor, but while the latter has managed to earn a long-lasting career in film and television, his brother Chet Hanks has chafed against the family name since the very beginning.

Though Chet now stars on Netflix's "Running Point" and has racked up credits that include "Empire" and "Atlanta," in 2022, he confessed in a since-deleted YouTube video partly titled "The Truth About Growing Up as a Hanks" that he'd been left with crippling insecurity because of his parents' fame (via E! News).

Chet — who courted controversy with an ill-considered rap career and patois accent — confessed that he'd rebelled against his parents so that he could make a name on his own. "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," he admitted, "and it was extremely hard to break down their walls." 

While many nepo babies have to contend with their famous parents having fans, Dakota Johnson actually comes from a long line of stars. While her father is "Miami Vice" hunk Don Johnson, her mother is Melanie Griffith, daughter of "The Birds" star Tippi Hedren. In other words, Dakota has dealt with the public's expectation of her family for as long as she can remember.

"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," Dakota recalled to Vogue Germany. "If you accept that as normal as a young child, it can lead to a lot of insecurities."

That incident when she was younger isn't the only time Dakota bristled against her mother's fame. Dakota will never forget her awkward first meeting with Barack Obama, which involved Griffith telling the president about her daughter's budding acting career, which at the time mostly included a pair of booty shorts in "The Social Network."

If you watch John David Washington act — if you hear the way he laughs in films like "Tenet" and "BlacKKKlansman" – there's no denying that he's the product of Denzel and Pauletta Washington's decades-long relationship. Though John David is now proud of his connection to his father, he tried to hide it for a long time. In an interview with Esquire, for example, his high school art teacher recalled telling him to write about his father's art collection. "He responded acidly, 'Sure, maybe you can just come to my house so my father can give you a tour,'" she recalled. "I felt like he was telling me something important."

Any chance he got, John David avoided telling people who his father was. After all, he could tell that they looked at him differently when they found out. "I used to lie, saying he was a construction worker or in jail, just to have some sense of normalcy. I felt like there was no way people would take me seriously, even if I was good," he told Mr. Porter. "They would always judge me. So I hid who my father was."

When she competed on "Dancing With The Stars" in 2015, Rumer Willis stunned the audience by opening up about the insecurities she developed while growing up. The daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore confessed that she'd faced severe bullying all her life, being teased by numerous people who said she looked more like her father than her mother.

Adding herself firmly to the list of nepo babies who have been honest about their struggles, Rumer 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" (via BBC News).

As Moore looked on from the audience in tears, the "Sorority Row" star said the backlash was so severe that she considered getting plastic surgery. "If I change my face or get really skinny, that will be it, that will be the answer and it's not," she remembered thinking.

There are several tragic details about Elle King's life, not least of which is her strained relationship with her father, Rob Schneider. Though the comedian largely didn't help raise his daughter, they have tried to reconcile several times over the years. In 2024, the "America's Sweetheart" singer revealed on an episode of Bunnie XO's "Dumb Blonde" podcast (via People) that she had no interest in repairing things with her father. She had finally given up on their relationship thanks to his controversial views about queer people and the way he tried to get her to lose weight when she was younger.

Schneider tried to apologize to his daughter during an interview with Tucker Carlson, and King told People that she wasn't interested in accepting. She hadn't intended to provoke him, the singer said. "I never in a million years thought that that was going to go viral," King clarified. "I was just speaking about my childhood and about my truth." She pointed out that her father's apology wasn't necessarily to be trusted anyway. "I think an apology on 'Tucker Carlson' is like a double negative, right?" King said.

Few mother-daughter duos in Hollywood history were as close as Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. They'd been by each other's side through a lot, sticking up for one another through affairs and addiction, though Fisher and Reynolds' relationship wasn't always as close as it became toward the end of their lives.

When Fisher was younger, she missed her mother terribly when Reynolds was away filming. "Todd and I wanted as much of her company as we could get," Fisher wrote in one of her memoirs (via Vanity Fair). "I slept on the rug on the floor next to her bed, and my brother slept on the couch near the window. In the morning when Todd and I got up, we would creep out of her room so we wouldn't wake her."

Fisher also resented her father, a singer named Eddie Fisher, who famously cheated on Reynolds with Elizabeth Taylor. "If I had an expectation that he was going to be some kind of parent to me, that was always going to disappoint. For whatever reason that is who he was," Fisher told The New York Times. "At least he did one thing: He knew he didn't deserve my care and attention, and he appreciated it." Reynolds and Fisher died one day apart in 2016.

"The Wizard of Oz" star Judy Garland and the star of "Cabaret" Liza Minnelli made their mark on everything from cinema to live theater. Unfortunately, one of several tragic details about Minnelli's life is that she witnessed her mother's struggle with addiction. 

"I was my mother's caretaker — a nurse, doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one," Minnelli wrote in her autobiography (via People). "I lost count of the times I called doctors to say she'd run out of pills. I'd say 'I'm a kid, please fill my mama's prescription!" Still, she told People that she didn't resent her parents for it. "My parents were extraordinary," she said. "Mama had been pushed around so much. You try growing up at MGM. Horrendous, but she was funny."

As she came into her own, Minnelli realized that her mother felt threatened by her blossoming talent. They performed together at the London Palladium when Minnelli was only 19, and her mother resented how well she did. "She could become so competitive," Minnelli recalled. "She was my mother. And then all of a sudden she turned into Judy Garland."