Dylan Sprouse says a family-tree search on Ancestry pushed him to joke that he and twin brother Cole are “children of incest”, and Cole hung up rather than hear it.
Page Six reported that the 34-year-old actor walked through the findings on Tuesday’s episode of the Wildmen Podcast, tracing both sides of his family back to California in the Gold Rush era and into a loop of marriages that, in his telling, closed in on itself.
The former Disney Channel star framed it as genealogy whiplash, not a legal case file. He said his father’s side was “pretty fractured,” so he started contacting relatives he had never met and comparing notes until the pattern snapped into view.
Identical twins already defined the Sprouse brand. Dylan and Cole grew up in front of viewers as Zack and Cody on “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody,” and Cole later drew a second wave of fame on “Riverdale.” Dylan said he had always assumed twinning ran through his mother’s line. The Ancestry trail, he argued, said otherwise.
Dylan told listeners both sides of the family were in California during the Gold Rush. By the 1800s, he said, the lines had joined through marriage, split apart, and then joined again through his mother and father.
"I’ve found a lot of family members, weirdly, who I never met, because my dad’s side of the family is pretty fractured. I started to talk to them, compare and contrast,"
he said, describing how the conversations stacked up.
"And then they diverged, and then they married again [through] my mom and my dad,"
he added.
That history, in his account, also explained a streak of twins he had not fully clocked before. He said his father’s uncles were identical twins and that the wider tree showed seven sets of twins across four generations.
"I’d only ever thought that identical twins or twins in general came from my mom’s side of the family,"
Dylan said.
"We had seven sets of twins in four generations. Which is crazy."
His punch line followed right behind that claim: the twin boom was not random chance. “And the reason we have a lot of twins is because it’s the same family!”
Dylan said he phoned his brother with the news and labeled it “f***ing crazy.” Cole did not want to hear it and hung up.
Dylan still finished the thought on the podcast.
"Long story short, Cole and I are children of incest."
He also floated a grotesque family medical story as part of the same tree talk, saying one aunt was a twin who “ate her twin in the womb,” and that a cyst later cut from her shoulder “had teeth and hair.” He promised listeners he does not “have webbed toes.”
None of that arrived with a public reply from Cole in the available account. It arrived as Dylan’s retelling of a private call and a messy paper trail he believed Ancestry and newfound relatives had helped him reconstruct.
The podcast turn landed while Dylan’s own household was still in first-year mode. He and wife Barbara Palvin, 33, welcomed their first child, daughter Sylvie, last month, relative to the report. Before Palvin walked in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on Sunday, Dylan told E! News the baby had started recognizing faces.
"She’s smiling and laughing at my jokes,"
he said.
"Which is all a dad can really dream of."
That is a softer register than the incest one-liner. It is also the split screen modern celebrity life keeps serving: nursery milestones on one channel, oversharing family archaeology on another.
Online audiences already police family-boundary stories with a heavy hand. The New York Post reported a separate firestorm around YouTuber Nick Yardy, who drew incest accusations and disgust after promoting a mother-daughter throuple stunt and pregnancy claim he later called a skit, while still insisting the relationship itself was real. Dylan’s monologue is genealogy shock comedy, not that saga. The speed of the public flinch, though, is familiar whenever the word “incest” hits a headline.
Strip away the celebrity names and the structure is simple. A famous twin used a consumer genealogy product, cold-called branches of a broken paternal line, and decided the marriages in the record ran too close for comfort. He packaged the conclusion as a blunt joke. His brother refused the call. Fans got the monologue anyway.
Distant cousin marriage in nineteenth-century California is not the same thing as the crime the word “incest” forces into a reader’s head. Dylan still chose the strongest word in the bag and aimed it at himself and Cole. That choice is why the clip travels. It is also why a hung-up phone reads like the sanest beat in the story.
Hollywood will keep mining childhood fame, DNA kits, and baby announcements for content. Ordinary families still get to keep some secrets without a podcast punch line.
