Penny For Your Thoughts: Kaley Cuoco is The Rake's Issue 104 Cover Star
What came after The Big Bang Theory? At 40, Kaley Cuoco has some answers — for herself as well as her fans. The prodigiously gifted and competitive star tells TOM CHAMBERLIN how she learned to play it long in Hollywood’s ‘heart-wrenching’ game of life.
There are two narratives that have followed Kaley Cuoco around like her four doting dogs. The first is the one about precocity: she was a gifted child actor who never stopped working. The second concerns scale: after 12 years on one of the most successful television shows in history, inevitably there will be questions as to how you tackle your next act. As much as I wanted to find something new to talk to her about, it was hard not to be sucked back in.
She is remarkably unruffled about discussing either narrative. I have known many actors over the years try to people-please their way towards not being forgotten — to remain valuable to the big showbiz machine. Cuoco retains a self-assuredness rarely seen in the creative arts.
For the young Kaley, the two paths that lay before her seemed clear yet incompatible. Given a choice between a career in tennis or a career in acting, you have to pick one and commit. What stands out is that both livelihoods require a peripatetic existence — long spells away from home, on the road, seeing the world. I was curious as to what drove her towards either one. “I hated school,” she says plainly. “I didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t fun for me.”
She had a sister who thrived in the environment, but Kaley was happiest with one close friend, and she was content to exist on the margins. “I loved acting and I loved sports, and [they] truly got me out of school,” she says. “I knew in my soul that I didn’t want to do anything in my life that had anything to do with school.”
Fortuitously, she has a trait that is critical in either profession: competitiveness. “My friends won’t even play games with me any more,” she says. “Like, they don’t want to be on my team. I am physically pained by losing absolutely anything. I want to win at everything. I want to be my best I can possibly be, at anything, down to a simple game of Scrabble. I learned early on, I cannot play someone in Scrabble. The pain that it causes me when I lose games.”
Her childhood was filled with auditions, commercials, tennis camps, art classes and horses. She gained television credits in the early nineties and then, in 1995, her first feature-film credit, when she was just 10 years old. Cuoco praises her parents for how they managed her ambitions with cautious encouragement. “They sat me down when I was really young and said, ‘Listen, is [acting] something you really want to do? Because this is getting to be an adult job.’”
She said yes, and they believed her: “To their insane credit — I still cannot believe it — they were like, ‘O.K.’” Their support came with conditions: she had to retain everything else in her life — tennis, camps, friends and balance (before ‘balance’ became an industry buzzword). “They were smart,” she says. “They didn’t want me at 10 or 11 years old being sad that I lost out on a job. That’s not what an 11-year-old should be doing. My mom continued to drive me [to auditions] until I could drive myself, and continued to let me audition. I don’t know if I would have been so easygoing.”
It feels like trickery to have managed to be both maniacally competitive and immune, at such a young age, to Hollywood rejection. She says: “I always had a bunch of things going on, so if I didn’t get an [acting] job, it didn’t affect me.”
She carried that approach into adulthood, and what would become the defining chapter of her early career. When The Big Bang Theory arrived in 2007, there was little to indicate that it would become the biggest show on television during its 12-year run. Its qualities were modest — niche references and low-level sex appeal in comparison with the more promiscuous storylines to be found at the time in Friends or Two and a Half Men.
The Big Bang Theory, however, had a couple of useful advantages. The first was Chuck Lorre, its co-creator and producer, the man known as the ‘king of sitcoms’, who helped make the show a sort of 21st-century Snow White. The second was its kindness and gentleness. “That was my dream job,” Cuoco says now. “To be on something for 12 years with the same group of people, to love that job as much as I did most of the time — that was a gift from above.” It also helped her develop good professional habits. “My work ethic, my comedic timing, learning how to turn on a dime, make people laugh,” she says. “What a dream job.”
When it came to a close, after 279 episodes, and with 18 million people watching the finale, the usual questions followed — whether she could avoid typecasting and being defined by a single role. The questions were attended by anxiety. Cuoco didn’t attempt a symbolic break from her past, no strategic recalibration. She didn’t deliberately reject comedy or aim for a performative reinvention. But we did get to see another side of her when she appeared in The Flight Attendant, a darker thriller tackling themes such as alcoholism and death. “I never thought, Oh, I need to get away from this,” she says. “I just found The Flight Attendant book and loved it.”
