How Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco escaped sitcom curse with edgy reinvention

Kaley Cuoco has shed her ‘girl next door’ Big Bang Theory image overnight, escaping the curse of so many sitcom stars. Here’s how she did it.

After an exciting and romantic night out in Bangkok with a sexy passenger she served in First Class on the trip over, flight attendant Cassie Bowden is horrified to wake up next to his bloody corpse. She has no memory of what happened – including whether or not it was she who murdered him.

Though the pilot of The Flight Attendant, now streaming on Binge, does make it seem plausible that Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) could have killed her date, it seems much less likely that The Flight Attendant will kill Cuoco’s career. On the contrary, it’s putting her on exactly the right trajectory, no turbulence expected.

Cuoco’s role in The Flight Attendant is a surprisingly edgy U-turn for the former sitcom star.

Recently, Kimberly Ricci published an article at Uproxx assessing this project in the context of the one most people know Cuoco for – sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

For 12 seasons, Cuoco played Penny, a cute ditz living across the hall from some very nerdy physicists. As Ricci notes, Cuoco’s work outside The Big Bang Theory during those years did not earn her a lot of prestige or acclaim, but then, those might not have been things the actress worried or cared about much. After all, Big Bang was never the kind of show that made it onto many critics’ Top 10 lists (though it did win a total of 10 Emmys), but it was steady, lucrative work, which may have been more important to someone who had been in the business since the age of six.

RELATED: The Flight Attendant proves we underestimated Kaley Cuoco

Cuoco spent years as one of TV’s most bankable stars on Big Bang.

The extra-curricular work Cuoco made time for during her Big Bang tenure is certainly what you’d expect to see offered to someone on a reliably popular show – the hybrid live-action/CGI kids’ movie Hop; the Kevin Hart/Josh Gad vehicle The Wedding Ringer; the Lifetime true crime thriller Drew Peterson: Untouchable; and ad campaigns for Priceline (with William Shatner, no less) and Toyota. Is any of it memorable? Not really. Did it probably pay for a very nice house and support a lot of dog rescues? No doubt.

As Big Bang drew to a close, those who’d observed Cuoco’s career might have expected more of the same – average movies, maybe another sitcom, maybe nothing, since she could definitely afford to retire. But, in a recent interview for The Hollywood Reporter, Cuoco described how her management team, who’ve been working with her since she was a teenager, pushed her to think about what the next phase of her career should be, because “they knew [she] wasn’t planning”.

RELATED: Kaley Cuoco’s husband is a billionaire

Cuoco, seen here in The Flight Attendant, admits she wasn’t planning her next move after Big Bang. Picture: Supplied/HBO

To hear her tell it, the pivot was as easy as reading one line of The Flight Attendant, the Chris Bohjalian novel from which the miniseries is adapted, and calling her lawyer to make sure Reese Witherspoon hadn’t already bought the rights.

Ricci notes that what’s so striking about the evolution of Cuoco’s post-Big Bang career is she is “not punching above her weight” – and it’s true; it’s not like Laura Prepon playing notorious Canadian murderer Karla Homolka midway through the run of That ’70s Show or Calista Flockhart thinking she could sneak into A Midsummer Night’s Dream two years into Ally McBeal.

What Cuoco is doing now is different from Penny, but not too different. What’s most surprising is that it’s in shows that are part of the critical conversation, and that you probably can’t watch with your grandma.

Before The Flight Attendant, Cuoco’s very first post-Big Bang role was as the titular lead of the animated series Harley Quinn.

The origin story for this character is that, when she was Dr Harleen Quinzel, she met a lot of supervillains as a therapist at Gotham City’s notorious Arkham Asylum. One of these was the Joker, they became romantically involved, and before long she was reborn as Harley Quinn, running around the city in hot pants, swinging an enormous mallet and causing mayhem.

There’s an essential sweetness and giddiness to Harley that are Penny-esque – just with the crazy dial turned a few notches further into the red.

RELATED: Kaley Cuoco reveals the rude Big Bang question she’s always asked

Kaley Cuoco is a woman on the edge in The Flight Attendant. Picture: Supplied/HBO

Cassie has a lot in common with Penny, too: Whereas Penny’s job was to serve guests in a restaurant, Cassie brings refreshments to guests in the sky. Cassie probably drinks a lot more than Penny does, and is generally more of a mess in most aspects of her life, but again, there’s a sense in which Cassie just reads as Dark Penny, who’s had a worse start in life and made some bad decisions.

As far as we can tell in the pilot, Cassie’s misadventure with Alex (Michiel Huisman), her dead date, is purely bad luck of the sort that could happen to anyone who might go back to a stranger’s hotel room (and since that stranger looks like Michiel Huisman, who among us could honestly say we would not).

The point is, these roles are not wild departures from what we know Cuoco for. But the degree of control she has over them – throughout the development process, in the case of The Flight Attendant, or as an executive producer on Harley Quinn – indicate a level of intentionality with her choices that wasn’t especially evident before.

Cuoco’s new roles suggest a new phase in her career: Out with the laugh-tracked sitcoms, in with edgier fare. Picture: AFP

Get a 14-day free trial on Binge. Sign up at binge.com.au

Whereas Big Bang was a network sitcom that was expected to draw network numbers, selling a show to a subscription service means it can be edgier and more niche, exactly the kinds of qualities that confer the prestige Cuoco’s work may have lacked before.

And given the difficulties she describes to The Hollywood Reporter in finishing up shooting on The Flight Attendant after having to shut production down due to COVID, it’s not too bad to have an animated series to work on right now as they’re a lot more pandemic-proof.

Earlier this month, Mom – another sitcom in Big Bang’s Chuck Lorre’s stable – returned to the air without Anna Faris, who had formerly been, with Allison Janney, its co-headliner. The details surrounding Faris’s sudden exit from Momwithout so much as a single goodbye scene are still mysterious, and she hasn’t spoken publicly about what she plans to do next.

If she is thinking about ever acting again, maybe she can ask Cuoco over for a socially distanced drink; these two should definitely talk strategy.

The Flight Attendant is streaming now on Binge

This story originally appeared on Decider and is republished here with permission