Kevin Hart Really Does Have A Brother—But He’s Not Wesley Snipes

Netflix's True Story, starring Philadelphia-based actor/comedian Kevin Hart as Philadelphia-based actor/comedian "The Kid," is not actually a true story. If you look close enough at the series' official logo, you'll see that the top left corner of the 'T' in 'True' and the top right corner of the 'Y' in 'Story' are a different color than the rest of the letters; these are meant to signify single quotes. This is fiction. But that doesn't mean that True Story isn't heavily based on reality, but with some of the more, let's say, dramatic elements added for the sake of storytelling. For one? Let's go to the central conflict of the story: Kevin Hart really does have an older brother.

That older brother isn't named Carlton, though, like the character in True Story played to excellence by Wesley Snipes. Snipes, at 59, is nearly two decades older than the 42-year-old Hart, but the two play off one another so well that it's easy to believe that they're just a few years apart, brothers who grew up together with a complex, fractured relationship.

While True Story was created by Eric Newman (who is also the showrunner for Netflix's Narcos and Narcos: Mexico), Hart himself is also an executive producer. So when the entire plot of the series is based on the relationship between he and his older brother—and a screwy, one-bad-thing-after-another series of violent mistakes and mess-ups, it makes sense to wonder about the family dynamic that may have inspired it.

It would be ridiculous to assume that any of the plot points in True Story, despite the title, are based on fact. But the parallels are there, and you may be wondering about what there is to know about Hart's real brother.

Kevin Hart has an older brother named Robert Hart.

Kevin has talked about his brother, Robert, in his 2019 Netflix documentary series titled Don't F**k This Up. While Robert isn't quite as old as Wesley Snipes is in real life, he is significantly older than Kevin—the two have an eight year gap.

The two Hart siblings also, at one point, had a dynamic similar to that of Carlton and The Kid in the show. As Hart explained in the documentary series, Robert associated with gangs and sold drugs in their youth, behavior that led to their mother legally emancipating him, making him briefly estranged from the family. This is never spelled-out in True Story, but you can tell based on the way that people around The Kid talk about Carlton that the two likely have had a troubled past relationship. In real life, though, Robert and their mother, Nancy, made up before she died in 2007.

Robert, now sober, is a professional pool player and has a strong relationship with his famous brother. He's been active in spurts on social media, and is wildly supportive of his brother's work (unlike Carlton in the show, who dismisses Kid's new superhero movie as "kiddie" stuff early on).

In case you're looking for a direct parallel between True Story and the Hart brothers, look no further than Robert's Instagram; he refers to his brother as, you guessed it, "Kid."

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