Emerging with a role in an episode of the HBO dramedy series Sex and the City, Dennings has since appeared in the films The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Big Momma’s House 2, Charlie Bartlett, Raise Your Voice, The House Bunny, Defendor, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and Thor. Her mother, Ellen Judith Litwack, is a poet and speech therapist, and her father, Gerald J. Litwack, is a molecular pharmacologist and the chair of the Basic Sciences department of The Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Dennings began her career in commercials as a child; her first acting job was an ad for potato chips. She broke into television with an appearance on HBO’s Sex and the City in 2000. in 2002, Dennings played a teenager that stumbles into a group of ghosts on The Scream Team, a Disney Channel movie, and was cast for a 5 episode run on The WB’s Everwood. She was cast in a pilot for CBS, Sudbury, about a family of modern-day witches, based on the 1998 film Practical Magic, but the series wasn’t picked up. in September 2008, Dennings hoped to make Don DeLillo’s novel, End Zone into a film. Actors Sam Rockwell and Josh Hartnett were involved, but the project was not greenlit because of its controversial subject matter of nuclear war.
