The Big Bang Theory co-creator Chuck Lorre is opening up about why it “took a while to figure out” Kaley Cuoco‘s character Penny on the hit sitcom.
Lorre, alongside Warner Bros. Television Group chairman and CEO Peter Roth, appeared on the first episode of The Official Big Bang Theory Podcast, where they looked back at the beginning of the Emmy-winning series, specifically the two pilot episodes.
Cuoco actually joined the series following script rewrites. They ultimately retaped the pilot episode with Cuoco as lead, following the first, unaired pilot which featured two female leads, Katie (Amanda Walsh) and Gilda (Iris Bahr).
“The magic of Kaley was, Kaley’s character — as we figured this thing out on the fly — was amused by [Jim Parsons’ Sheldon Cooper and Johnny Galecki‘s Leonard Hofstadter], was not critical. If she got angry, it wasn’t harsh,” Lorre said of the character Penny. “The audience really responded to that.”
Roth added, “She was never judgmental about these characters. She was bemused by them, in fact. They brought more judgment to her than she did ever of them. And I thought that was also an important difference between the character of what Penny brought versus the character of what Katie brought in the original unaired pilot.”
However, even with the “magic of Kaley,” Lorre admitted that it took some time for them to fully understand the “brilliance” of Penny so that they could explore the character on a deeper level, compared to physicists Sheldon and Leonard.
“Even after the second pilot, we had so many episodes to go before we started to understand that there was a brilliance to Penny’s character that we had not explored,” the Two and a Half Men co-creator explained. “We did the very clichéd, in the beginning, goofy blonde who says foolish things. It’s a clichéd character: the dumb blonde, and we missed it.”
Lorre continued, “We didn’t have that right away that what she brought to this story, this series, to these other characters was an intelligence that they didn’t have. A kind of intelligence that was alien to them, an intelligence about people and relationships and family. She brought a humanity to them that they were lacking. And that took a while to figure out. Certainly, in the beginning, she was sadly one-dimensional in many ways, but the gift of a TV series that starts working is you get time to learn.”
The Big Bang Theory, which ran for 12 seasons from 2007 to 2019, centers on aspiring film actress Penny who moves into a Pasadena apartment across the hall from brilliant, but socially awkward, physicists Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter and shows them how little they know about life outside of the lab.
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