*Dylan Sprouse says a DNA test uncovered a surprising link between his parents’ families. He summed it up with a punchline that quickly went viral.
“Long story short, Cole and I are children of incest,” the former Disney Channel star said on the Wildmen podcast, EW reports.
He was kidding. TMZ shared the clip on X on Oct. 20, and a Community Note added under the post clarified that Sprouse was joking. It also noted that his parents are not close relatives.
The real story is a family history mystery. Sprouse, 34, and his twin brother, Cole, come from a family with an unusual number of twins. He had long credited that to his mother’s relatives. Then he learned that two of his father’s uncles were identical twins, too.
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“We had seven sets of twins in four generations,” Sprouse said. He soon cracked the pattern: “Because it’s the same family!”
He immediately took his findings to his brother.
“I called Cole, I showed him a picture, I was like, ‘Dude, I just found out some [expletive] crazy [expletive],'” he said.
Sprouse pieced together the connection with help from Ancestry and from relatives he had never met. Many of them came from his dad’s side, which he described as “pretty fractured.”
The trail led back to the 1800s. Both of his parents’ families traveled west from North Carolina during the Gold Rush, and one side found gold and brought the others along. In California, the two clans wed in the late 1800s, then drifted apart for generations.
Long after, his mother and father met and married with no clue that their families had a shared past.
“It’s my dad and my mom. They had no idea. So, then I’m looking at this, and I go, ‘What the hell?'” Sprouse said.
He played up the shock for laughs on the podcast, even assuring listeners that he has no “webbed toes.”
Watch the conversation below.
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