Dylan Sprouse made a “crazy” discovery while digging into his ancestry, uncovering a family secret that revealed his parents were far more closely connected than he ever imagined. Now, both Dylan and his twin brother Cole have spoken out after the revelation made headlines.
Dylan Sprouse, best known for starring alongside his twin brother Cole in Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, has revealed how a DNA ancestry test uncovered a surprising connection between his parents’ families, prompting a shocking confession on the Oct. 20 episode of the Wildmen podcast.
Child stars
Long before the 34-year-old uncovered the unexpected connection in their family tree, he and Cole had already spent much of their lives side by side, building their careers in Hollywood.
The brothers got their start sharing a role on Grace Under Fire before landing their big movie break alongside Adam Sandler in the 1999 comedy Big Daddy. They later played Ben Geller on Friends and continued their Disney success with The Suite Life on Deck until 2011.
While the brothers grew up sharing the spotlight, they have since pursued separate acting careers, with Cole later starring as Jughead Jones in Riverdale and Dylan appearing in films including Beautiful Disaster and 2005’s Neglected.
Dylan welcomes first child
Away from the screen, Dylan has also been celebrating some major milestones in his personal life. He married Hungarian model Barbara Palvin in 2023, and the couple recently welcomed their first child, a daughter named Sylvie, announcing her arrival on Sept. 28.
During a September episode of Wildmen, Dylan shared his excitement about becoming a father.
“There’s a moment when I look at Sylvie, and I’m like, ‘This is the coolest thing ever,’” he said, per People. “She’s looking at me, and her eyes are opening. She’s got a small wake window during the day, and she’s looking at me, and she smiles or something, and it’s the cutest thing.”
Meanwhile, Palvin made a return to the runway on October 18, walking in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show just six weeks after giving birth.
But as Dylan adjusted to becoming a father, he was also digging into his own family history, using an ancestry test to connect with relatives he had never met.
What he discovered along the way revealed a surprising connection between his parents’ families that neither he nor Cole had expected.
Suspicious number of twins in family
During the Oct. 20 episode of Wildmen, Dylan explained he “started to get suspicious” ancestry had changed as he uncovered more about his lineage.
As he pieced together the history of his mother and father, the star of Under Fire discovered that relatives from both sides of his family had settled in California during the Gold Rush, eventually joining through marriage in the late 1800s.
“And then, they diverged, and then they married again [through] my mom and my dad, like, last generation,” he explained.
That discovery became even more surprising when Dylan learned that his father’s uncles were identical twins, something he hadn’t expected given the number of twins already known on his mother’s side.
“I’d only ever thought that identical twins or twins in general came from my mom’s side of the family. We had seven sets of twins in four generations, which is crazy. It’s a lot of twins,” Dylan said.
‘Children of incest’
Realizing the family histories were connected, Dylan concluded that the unusual pattern of twins “started to make sense” “because it’s the same family!”
“One of my aunts was a twin, but she was one of the twins who ate her twin in the womb, and when they cut open a cyst in her shoulder, it had teeth and hair,” he said.
“Long story short, Cole and I are children of incest,” he shared, adding that his parents were “not the ones to blame…Clearly they had no idea.”
He immediately contacted Cole to share the discovery.
“I called Cole, I showed him a picture, I was like, ‘Dude, I just found out some f***ing crazy s***,’” he recalled.
According to Dylan, his brother was considerably less enthusiastic: “And I sent him a picture and he goes, ‘Not looking at that.’ Closed it, hung up on me.”
Called the headlines “clickbait”
Although Dylan used the term “incest” to describe his discovery, his account concerned marriages between branches of the family generations apart, rather than a confirmed incestuous relationship between his parents. The precise degree of relatedness was not established in the podcast.
Cole later took to Instagram to poke fun at the “clickbait” headlines sparked by his brother’s remarks.
The actor shared a news post on his Instagram Stories with the headline, “Dylan Sprouse says he & brother Cole are ‘children of incest’.” Reacting to the wording, he joked, “No media training on earth can prep you to read this clickbait headline at 10am.”
Earlier that day, Dylan had shared the same post on his own Stories, also amused by the headline. “Ngl (not gonna lie) they cooked with this headline… printing this out and hanging it over the communal family bed,” he wrote.
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