The Shortest Celebrities, Ranked by Height

Here they are, side by side, at their real heights: Simone Biles at 4’8″ (142 cm), Danny DeVito at 4’10″ (147 cm), Ariana Grande at 5’0″ (152 cm), Kevin Hart at roughly 5’3″ barefoot (160 cm), Bruno Mars at 5’5″ (165 cm) and Tom Cruise at 5’7″ (170 cm) — with the average man (5’9″, 175 cm) standing in for scale. On screen, in concert lighting, and on magazine covers, these six look like giants. Lined up honestly, the shortest of them barely reaches the average man’s shoulder.

A word on method before the numbers, because most celebrity-height lists are sloppy in exactly the ways we are about to avoid. Every figure here is cross-checked against at least two independent sources — the gymnast’s own statements, NPR’s Hollywood height reporting, on-camera admissions, and the 60 Minutes interview that finally forced one comedian to commit. Where a figure is disputed (Hart, Grande), we say so loudly and chart the most defensible number, not the flattering one. Hollywood’s standard practice is to round up, add shoes, and never speak of it; this chart does the opposite.

The context that makes the chart startling: the average American adult man stands 5’9″ (175 cm) and the average woman 5’4″ (161 cm), per measured CDC data. Every man on this list is below his gender’s average — DeVito by a remarkable 28 cm — and Biles and Grande are below theirs too. And yet the six of them have, between them, Olympic gold medals, Grammys, Emmys and some of the highest-grossing films ever made. The chart below is the visual proof that height and stature are different things.

Simone Biles, at 4’8″ (142 cm), is the shortest person on this list — a figure she has confirmed herself on numerous occasions, including on her own social media. She is also the most decorated gymnast in history, which is not a coincidence: elite gymnastics strongly selects for compact builds. Shorter levers rotate faster, a lower centre of gravity steadies landings, and a lighter frame is easier to launch off a vault. Nobody sets out to be 4’8″ for the sport; rather, the sport’s physics rewards the athletes who are, so the podiums fill with gymnasts built like Biles.

The scale of it hits hardest in photographs. Biles’ husband, NFL safety Jonathan Owens, stands 5’11″ — a full 33 cm taller, more than a foot of difference. A famous 2017 photo of Biles next to Shaquille O’Neal (7’1″) shows a gap of over two feet that looks almost doctored and is entirely real. She has joked about her height for years, but the numbers underneath the jokes are remarkable: at 142 cm she sits below the 1st percentile for adult women, and she turned that frame into the most dominant gymnastics career ever recorded.

Danny DeVito, at 4’10″ (147 cm), is five centimetres taller than Biles and the shortest leading man of his generation. His height has a medical explanation he has discussed openly: a genetic bone condition called multiple epiphyseal dysplasia (sometimes referred to as Fairbank’s disease) that affected his growth. Rather than hide it, DeVito built one of the most distinctive screen careers in Hollywood on the back of exactly the qualities people told him would hold him back — from Louie De Palma in Taxi to the Penguin in Batman Returns, from directing and starring in Matilda to two decades as Frank Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The famous sight gag of 1988’s Twins — DeVito standing next to 6’2″ Arnold Schwarzenegger — turned a 41 cm height gap into box-office gold.

No celebrity height has generated more contradictory testimony than Kevin Hart’s, and the comedian himself is the least reliable witness. In a 2019 lie-detector segment, Hart first claimed 5’5″, then 5’3″, and finally settled on 5’2″ — which the machine judged truthful. He also admitted, truthfully, that his height makes him self-conscious. That should have settled it: 5’2″, about 157 cm, on the record and polygraph-verified.

Then came the walk-back. In April 2024, Anderson Cooper confronted Hart on 60 Minutes with the conflicting reports — GQ said 5’5″, the LA Times said 5’4″, and “some other place” said 5’2″. Hart laughed the last one off (“that place is bullshit”) and declared: “GQ finally got it right. Five-foot-five, like with a shoe on, like a sneaker. Now, if I put a boot on, I can get to 5’5 and a half.” It was a masterclass in technically-true comedy: 5’5″ in footwear is entirely compatible with 5’2″ barefoot, because a sneaker sole plus the usual listed-height rounding buys you the missing inches.

So how tall is Kevin Hart, really? The honest answer is a range, not a number: around 5’2″ to 5’3″ barefoot, stretching to about 5’4″ in shoes — which is why we chart him at 160 cm (~5’3″), the midpoint of the credible barefoot estimates, with this caveat attached. Hart himself has said he jokes about his height on stage so the audience laughs with him rather than at him, and it worked: he became one of the few comedians ever to outsell Jerry Seinfeld. The dispute is the point. In an industry that quietly adds two inches to everyone, Hart’s height is the rare celebrity statistic with a public paper trail — and the paper trail is funnier than the number.

Ariana Grande is the list’s other disputed entry, and the dispute runs in the opposite direction: most listings put her at 5’0″ (152 cm), while Grande herself has claimed 5’2″. We chart the listed 152 cm and note the claim, because the gap is instructive — it is almost exactly the standard Hollywood inflation of heels plus generous rounding. Barefoot, photographed next to genuinely tall people, the 5’0″ figure holds up better. Either way, she is one of the shortest women headlining stadiums in the world, and her stagecraft — the ponytail, the proportions, the sheer vocal size — makes the question feel faintly absurd.

Bruno Mars, at 5’5″ (165 cm), is the consensus pick of this trio — the figure is consistent across listings, and Mars himself has confirmed it with good humour in interviews. He sits around the 7th percentile for adult men: genuinely short, unambiguously documented, and completely irrelevant to a career built on some of the most athletic live performances in pop. If anything, Mars is the patron saint of this list’s thesis: nobody has ever left a Bruno Mars concert thinking about his height.

Tom Cruise, at 5’7″ (170 cm), is the tallest person on this list and the one Hollywood has worked hardest to make look tall. The techniques are an open secret by now: careful camera angles, boots with lifts, blocking that keeps him on the higher step, and co-stars chosen or positioned to flatter — red-carpet photos next to 5’9″ Cameron Diaz or 5’11″ Nicole Kidman tend to shatter the illusion. Cruise lands around the 20th–25th percentile for men: short, but not remarkably so — which is precisely why the industry’s effort to hide it is the interesting story. Four decades as the definitive movie star, three Oscar nominations, and films grossing over $10 billion worldwide, all at 170 cm. The camera adds ten pounds and, with enough effort, three inches.

Raw inches mislead; percentiles tell the truth. DeVito at 147 cm stands roughly 28 cm below the average man — around four standard deviations down, which puts him below the 1st percentile of adult men. Fewer than one man in a hundred is that short. Biles at 142 cm is below the 1st percentile for adult women by a similar margin. Mars at 165 cm sits around the 7th percentile for men, Hart’s ~160 cm around the 3rd, and Cruise at 170 cm around the 20th–25th — short, but the kind of short you meet every day without noticing.

It helps to think in gaps rather than absolutes. DeVito gives up 28 cm — eleven inches — to the average man: that is roughly the length of a human head plus a neck, which is why he reads as “head and shoulders” shorter in any group photo. Biles gives up 33 cm to her own husband. These are the differences your visual system is actually registering when a celebrity looks “surprisingly short” in person: not the number, but the gap to the people around them.

One final honesty note, because it applies to every figure on this list: listed heights are almost always measured in shoes and rounded up, while barefoot morning height is the true figure — a gap of 2 to 3 cm for most people. That is the entire Ariana Grande dispute (152 vs 158 cm) and most of the Kevin Hart one. Genuine barefoot figures, like Biles’s self-reported 4’8″ or the lie-detector 5’2″, are the gold standard; everything else is footwear plus optimism. If this article has you curious about your own number, our guide to measuring your height accurately at home walks through the proper barefoot-against-the-wall technique — and then you can add yourself to the chart above and take your place in the lineup.

The comparison tool at the top of this article is preloaded with all six celebrities plus the average man, drawn to true scale. Add your own height and the chart redraws instantly: stand yourself next to DeVito and see the 28 cm the average man gives up; next to Biles and see whether you clear her 142 cm by a head; next to Cruise and check whether Hollywood’s camera magic has been fooling you too.

A few suggested experiments. First, the couples test: pair yourself with a partner and see how your gap compares to Biles and Owens’ 33 cm — our guide to celebrity couples with the biggest height differences has more extreme pairings to try. Second, the percentile check: drop in the average man (175 cm) and woman (161 cm) alongside yourself to see which side of average you land on. Third, the honesty test: measure yourself properly barefoot, in the morning, and compare that figure to what your driving licence claims — most people are carrying 2 to 3 cm of footwear optimism.

And if this list made you curious about the other end of the scale, we have that covered too: our ranking of US presidents’ heights runs from 5’4″ James Madison to 6’4″ Abraham Lincoln, and the K-pop idol height comparison lines up an industry where the men average a head taller than everyone on this page. Short, tall, or somewhere in between — the chart doesn’t judge. It just draws the truth to scale.