A few years ago, but long after she became one of the highest-paid women on American television, the Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco was asked to be on the cover of a magazine. And when she was given the finished issue, there it was in big, bold writing: “newcomer Kaley Cuoco”.
“Isn’t that crazy?” Cuoco gasps, in that lightning-fast but immaculately enunciated voice of a seasoned sitcom star. “So I said, ‘huh – I guess I’ll just sit, smile and wave and try to get away with this’.”
Cuoco has never known what it’s like to be an ordinary person, having been an actor since the age of six. But despite being a presence on US TV for more than two decades – first in the early Noughties family sitcom 8 Simple Rules… for Dating My Teenage Daughter, then in 12 seasons of Big Bang, and most recently in the acclaimed comic thriller The Flight Attendant – the 40-year-old is still sorta-kinda, sorta-unusually under the radar. “There are actors who get thrown into fame overnight, right? And they’re like The Beatles,” she says. “But I’ve just been kind of there.”
Today, there is a hotel in London, where she’s promoting an action thriller series she’s in called Vanished. “It’s me just gallivanting all over Marseilles,” she laughs. “Some days I’d go, like, how much did I run today?”. Cuoco is dressed in a white baby doll dress, her hair bronzed at the tips. She’s been padding around between rooms all day, her shoes kicked off somewhere she can’t remember. As deeply banal as it may be to say so, Cuoco seems “real” in that particular way that gets them cast a lot as romantic comedy heroines or as girls next door. She played one to perfection on Big Bang: Penny, a shimmering blonde who never dismissed the geeks she’s neighbours with, but actively wanted to be BFFs with them. It inverted the possible clichés of such a setup and turned the show into a phenomenon. Big Bang was arguably the closest thing to Friends – in reach, devotees and $1m-an-episode salaries – since, well, Friends.
There are lots of ways to follow up a blockbuster sitcom. You can sit on your piles of money like a Matt LeBlanc, emerging only occasionally to indulge hobbies or be gentle on talk shows. Or you can pull a Jennifer Aniston and really try to build something. A movie career, maybe. Or television that pushes you in new directions, forcing critics and audiences to sit up and pay attention. (Hence, for Cuoco, the “newcomer” thing.) “I don’t mind being the comedy girl-next-door,” Cuoco says. “I could do that forever. But I could also try to do something else…”
She didn’t see it coming, but Cuoco has become an unexpected go-to for the TV equivalents of books you’d pick up at the airport. And not just because one of them was set on lots of planes. The Flight Attendant, the 2021 series about an alcoholic flight attendant who awakens next to a dead body, was a frothy, bingeable smash that earned Cuoco nominations at the Emmys and Golden Globes. And now Vanished – zippy, cliffhanger-fuelled, goes down easy – sees her play a woman whose on-again/off-again boyfriend (played by Sam Claflin) disappears during a European vacation. She’s an archaeologist. He’s (apparently) involved with aid for refugees. But as she delves deeper into his disappearance, she uncovers an unexpectedly labyrinthine conspiracy. It’s sort of gloriously silly, filled with running-down-hills North by Northwest aping, moustache-twirling Eurotrash bad guys, and location porn. And Cuoco is great, retaining that lovely comic ebullience of hers, while embodying a character a little more grounded than the ones she usually plays. “In The Flight Attendant, I was the one spinning,” she says. “In Vanished, everything around me is going crazy, so I’m having to methodically figure it all out. It felt real and scary, and believable to me.”
Cuoco says she doesn’t feel pressure to live up to Big Bang, or even The Flight Attendant, which she produced herself. “Though I’ve had success with one thing, it doesn’t mean the next one will be like that,” she says. “I understand the business. I go into things hoping they’ll resonate, but I’m also very realistic – someone’s gonna like it, and someone’s not, and that’s all that art is.” She laughs, then shrugs.
It’s a lesson she learnt relatively early. Sandwiched in between 8 Simple Rules – where she played the rebellious teen daughter of John Ritter’s stressed dad – and Big Bang was Charmed, the Aaron Spelling-produced fantasy drama about three sister witches, which starred at various junctures the likes of Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan and the late Shannen Doherty. Cuoco was airlifted into what proved to be its final season (its eighth) to play a spunky teenage witch. As a 13-year-old meanie on the internet in 2005, I was very aware that Cuoco wasn’t exactly embraced by the show’s fandom. But it turns out she wasn’t embraced much on set, either. When I mention the show’s title, she goes cross-eyed. When I suggest that it was probably a difficult gig, she goes cross-eyed again. “I’m not on camera, am I?” Cuoco cackles. “Just me making all these faces…”
She ponders how much she wants to say. “I came into Charmed really not thinking anything other than I got this cool job,” she remembers. “But it caused a few more waves than I imagined. Let me put it this way: from that point on, no matter what job I have, I am so understanding of new people coming in – whether that’s people behind the camera, or on camera, someone with one line…”
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“It was intense and difficult,” she continues. “There were a few people on that show that were wonderful to me, and there were a few people that weren’t. I remember them both very clearly. I’ve been doing this my whole life, and I have had very few experiences that weren’t the best, but I remember thinking: ‘I will always make sure every single person feels like they’re part of the group’. Because there’s nothing worse than feeling outside of it, especially on a set when everyone is cliquey and has been together for so long, and there’s a comfort level. When someone new comes into that, it’s tough.”
She thinks about how John Ritter set the tone for the 8 Simple Rules set. “He was the biggest of the big and treated every single person the same,” she says. “Whether you’re an executive or if you’re a background actor.” Cuoco knew Ritter, who found fame on the Eighties sitcom Three’s Company, for little more than a year. Production had started on the second season of 8 Simple Rules when he died suddenly – from an aortic dissection, at the age of 54 – shortly after collapsing on set. Cuoco, 17 at the time, remembers being floored by the industry-wide outpouring of grief over Ritter’s death, and how eager people were to speak about him. “I remember there was a guy who worked in the mailroom on the Disney lot, and he said, ‘Can I tell my John story?’” Cuoco wells up, then dabs at her eyes. “I knew if I could emulate anyone in the industry, he is who I’d want to be. To this day, I’m always like, ‘what would John do in this situation?’. He’s my guiding light.”
Ritter, she says, taught her how to lead a set, manoeuvre the business, and see the fun in what she’s doing. It was an approach she took to Big Bang, which proved to be a creative and emotional balm after Charmed. By its fourth season, it was the most-watched comedy on American television. Cuoco and her co-stars (among them Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons) were a tight unit – she compares herself to Wendy from Peter Pan, and her castmates to the Lost Boys. “I was constantly trying to keep this group together desperately, and we all really did love each other, but it was 12 years,” she says. “There were ups and downs. I did a lot of hand-holding, and I think I did the best that I could. But, you know, these kinds of shows… it was an explosion of money and fame and became something so much bigger than any of us could have imagined. So of course there was a little bit of drama.”
Money, eventually, created bouts of tension. Like Friends and Seinfeld before it, Big Bang was subject to years of chatter about how much its cast were earning – by the last few seasons of the show, Cuoco and her co-stars were making $1m per episode. But in 2017, two years before the show ended, they were encouraged by the heads of the show’s US network, CBS, to take pay cuts in order for the show’s newer cast members (actors Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch) to achieve a kind of parity with them.
Negotiations were fraught, agents and managers got involved, and details were splashed across the press. “It was weird,” Cuoco recalls. “Would anyone want people sharing what they make? Or comparing what they make to [other people]?” She hesitates to complain, though. “We’re in the public eye, so that stuff is going to be known. If you’re like, ‘oh, I wish people didn’t know that’, well… then don’t be famous.”
She knows that the show still matters, and that people still adore it. “It was lightning in a bottle, and a very special moment in time that people love to this day, and will hopefully love forever,” she says. She adds that it changed her, too. “I learnt so much from Big Bang as an actor, as a human, as a businesswoman.”
And thanks to its success, she now gets to run around Marseilles and shoot bad guys. For a newcomer, it’s not half bad.
‘Vanished’ is streaming on Prime Video
