The “Paradise” star and St. Louis native shares how going by his first name honors his father, whom he lost at the age of 10 years old.
Sterling K. Brown has become a household name in many respects, but he used to go by a completely different name.
The 49-year-old actor shrugged off his first name, Sterling, as a kid and instead went by his middle name until he was a teenager.
“I went by ‘Kelby’ until I was 16 years old,” the “Paradise” star said during a recent appearance on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.”
“My dad’s Sterling Brown Jr. My grandfather Sterling Brown Sr. I’m Sterling Kelby Brown,” the Emmy winner explained. “I wanted my own name, and it felt like Sterling was like an old man’s name.”
However, the “This Is Us” alum eventually switched back to his first name during his teen years in honor of his father.
“Because he passed away when I was 10, by the time I turned 16 and I hadn’t heard his name for five-and-a-half years, I was like, I kind of just want to hear that name again, so I asked people to call me Sterling,” he said.
The St. Louis native, who now shares two sons of his own with his wife, Ryan Michelle Bathe, has opened up about his father’s death over the years. During a 2019 interview on “Sunday Today with Willie Geist,” the actor shared what happened the day his father died.
“Waking up that morning and going into the kitchen and my mom being on the phone and calling the paramedics, and asking me to put clothes on my dad, ‘cause he was naked in the bed,” Brown recalled. “And his body was stiff. And as they’re carrying him out on the stretcher, he looks at me over the railing, and he winks. Just winks. They carry him out the door — last time I saw him.”
Brown added, “I will say this about Sterling Brown Jr.: He filled me up with so much love. So while the time was short, it was everything that I could’ve hoped for for 10 years.”
When Brown won the Emmy in 2016 for his performance in “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” he dedicated the award to his father. Speaking about his dad after the awards, Brown told Access Hollywood Live he has a sneaking suspicion his father is looking down at him in his career, “smiling from ear to ear.”
“I lost my dad relatively early in life, but he gave me 10 of the best years that a kid could ever have,” Brown said, per People magazine. “And I never doubt that he loved me unequivocally, unconditionally. Oh, he loved TV. He loved entertainment, and so the fact that I became an actor and this is what I do for a living, like I know he’s smiling from ear to ear.”
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