Kaley Cuoco Reveals Why ‘Flight Attendant’ Took Her out of Her Element

Actress Kaley Cuoco is receiving the best reviews of her career from her recent HBO Max show, The Flight Attendant, earning a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. The Big Bang Theory alum has been open about how she grew as a performer while working on The Flight Attendant, and for The Hollywood Reporter‘s annual Comedy Actress Roundtable, Cuoco admitted that she was definitely out of her element filming some aspects of the show. She opened up to fellow panelists Jean Smart, Lena Waithe, Aidy Bryant, Holly Hunter, and Cristin Milioti about what it was like filming her first sex scene.

“I had never done any sort of sex scene ever, and I had one in Flight Attendant with Michiel [Huisman],” she explained. “He’d been in Game of Thrones, so he’d done all these scenes, and I just had no idea. When they called ‘cut,’ I’d be hovering over him like I was on a toilet. I’m like, ‘I’m not touching anything, I’m not looking at anything.’ I didn’t know what to do.”

The premiere episode of The Flight Attendant features Cuoco and Huisman’s characters getting wasted and having sex, and then her waking up with him dead in her bed. “[Huisman] was like, ‘You’re acting so weird, you’re making this way weirder than it needs to be,’” Cuoco said. “But I was totally out of my element!”

While her work on The Flight Attendant was vastly different than The Big Bang Theory and showed her range as an actress, Cuoco insisted that she wasn’t actively trying to shed her sitcom roots. “For me, coming from a sitcom of 12 years, it was about trying to do something different — but not so different that people are like, ‘Why is she doing that?’ It was a bit of a fine line,” she explained. “Like, I wanted to flex different muscles, but I get asked a lot, ‘Are you trying to get away from Penny?’ And the answer is not at all.”

“I would’ve played Penny for 20 years,” Cuoco continued. “But I was nervous, wondering, like, am I going to be accepted, even by the business? Or are [people] going to be like, ‘Why is this sitcom girl trying to do this semi-serious show?’ And [then] it was like, where is the audience? Why isn’t anyone laughing? I need people just to clap for me 24/7.”