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10 Celebs You Didn’t Know Are RELATED

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Half of Hollywood turns out to be related to the other half — and a surprising number of them to the British royal family too.

TheThings Celebrity’s rundown, “10 Celebs You Didn’t Know Are RELATED,” strings together the kind of family trivia that makes for a good bar bet: cousins who don’t share a surname, siblings who’ve never worked together, and godparent arrangements that outlasted entire marriages. Some of the pairings are blood relations traced back centuries; others are honorary bonds forged on movie sets. Either way, the throughline is the same — Hollywood’s family tree is a lot more tangled than the tabloids let on.

• Actor Ralph Fiennes and Prince Charles are eighth cousins, both descended from King James II of Scotland.
• Macaulay Culkin is godfather to Paris Jackson, while Michael Jackson himself served as godfather to Nicole Richie, and Steven Spielberg took on the same role for Drew Barrymore after directing her in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”
• Blood ties inside the industry include Melissa McCarthy and Jenny McCarthy as first cousins, Liev and Pablo Schreiber as half-brothers, and Nicolas Cage’s direct lineage back to uncle Francis Ford Coppola.

The Royal Cousin Nobody Saw Coming

The Ralph Fiennes-Prince Charles connection is the kind of fact that sounds made up until you check the genealogy charts. Both men descend from King James II of Scotland, making them eighth cousins — distant enough that neither has likely ever mentioned it at a dinner party, but close enough on paper to count. It’s the same royal bloodline logic that connects Dakota and Elle Fanning to Kate Middleton, who share a distant tie through King Edward III. Britain’s royal family tree runs so deep that it quietly absorbs a chunk of the Screen Actors Guild along the way, a fact covered in more detail in Royal Family Members That Are Nothing Like They Seem.

Godfathers, Not Bloodlines

Not every connection in the video runs through a family tree — some of the strongest bonds were built entirely by choice. Macaulay Culkin has served as godfather to Paris Jackson, the daughter of his longtime friend Michael Jackson, a friendship that dated back to Culkin’s childhood stardom in the early 1990s. Jackson returned the favor in his own way, taking on the godfather role for Nicole Richie. Steven Spielberg’s version of the same arrangement came out of a film set: after directing then-six-year-old Drew Barrymore in 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” he became her godfather, a relationship that outlasted the movie by decades.

Ralph Fiennes and Prince Charles are eighth cousins — same royal bloodline as Dakota and Elle Fanning’s distant tie to Kate Middleton.

The Family Business, Literally

Then there’s the connections that never needed explaining once you knew the last name. Nicolas Cage’s link to the Coppola filmmaking dynasty runs directly through his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola — Cage changed his surname early in his career specifically to build a career outside his famous uncle’s shadow, though the family tie never went away. Liev Schreiber and Pablo Schreiber, half-brothers who don’t share a mother, have both built separate acting careers without much public overlap. And Jason Sudeikis’ aunt-and-uncle-style tie to “Cheers” alum George Wendt — his actual uncle — is the kind of fact that surprises people who grew up watching both “Saturday Night Live” and reruns of Wendt’s Norm Peterson.

Cousins Hiding in Plain Sight

The comedy world has its own version of this trivia in Melissa McCarthy and Jenny McCarthy, first cousins who built entirely separate lanes in the industry — one in scripted comedy, the other in hosting and modeling — without much public crossover between them. It’s the same pattern that runs through most of these entries: two famous people, same last name or not, who rarely if ever get asked about each other in interviews. For more of this genre of unexpected overlap, Celebs You’d Never Guess Knew Each Other In College covers a similar strain of Hollywood trivia.

What ties the whole list together is how little any of it maps onto stardom itself. A godfather role from a 1982 movie set, an eighth-cousin link running back to a Scottish king, a comedy career built by a McCarthy who isn’t the McCarthy — none of it required the two people involved to ever work together, or even mention it publicly. That’s the part that makes the trivia stick.