We’re not quite a decade out from when The Big Bang Theory ended, but interest is at an all-time high thanks to a new podcast looking into the making of the show. Because of this, there’s been a glut of brand new interviews, including one with Mayim Bialik in which she got really candid about landing the role of Amy Farrah Fowler. Apparently, she really needed a job at that time.
We’ve heard a bunch of Big Bang filming stories of late thanks to Jessica Radloff’s podcast. My personal favorite was learning Stuart Fails To Save The Universe’s Kevin Sussman nearly had landed the Howard Wolowitz role over Simon Helberg. Second to that though is Mayim Bialik’s recent admission she was desperate for the Amy role despite having never seen an episode of the Chuck Lorre sitcom prior to auditioning.
I had never seen The Big Bang Theory, and I had a nursing infant and a toddler. I had been out of the industry for 12 years. I had done like an episode of Bones, an episode of like I don't know, some legal show that I can't remember the name of right now. So I had done like a couple things, but I wasn't like, ‘Oh, we're back in the zone. I'm gonna be on a TV show.’
Of course, ‘80s and ‘90s kids know Mayim Bialik broke big as a child actress in Blossom, and worked regularly on TV into the early aughts. However, it sounds like Bialik took an intentional break from Hollywood to spend time with her two young children. At one point her family’s need for health insurance took precedent over anything else. She’d mentioned health insurance before, but I’d had no idea the Big Bang Theory role was so vital for her family at that time.
This was like, ‘I have two children, I’ve been out of the industry, I don’t have health insurance, I just would love to have a guest spot to just to try and keep up my SAG insurance.’ That’s the god’s honest truth.
She said on The Big Bang Theory podcast she had to audition, and it ended up being a “very old school audition” and there was a group of girls there who were all vying for Amy. There was no guarantee she would get the role. No one knew how badly she needed it.
I auditioned the way I audition for everything else, which is like, ‘Do your best, feel like a piece of shit, know that you probably won’t get it. That’s, like, what happens. After the audition my kids had a scouting thing in like the woods and I literally went to meet them in Griffith Park, like right after my audition. A friend had taken me to shop because I had no normal person clothes… I was in a Banana Republic pencil skirt because those were in, and a sweater set.
She’d gone out of her way to buy trendy clothes and try to look the part, but it sounds like she was simply hoping for a miracle and not expecting what came next. What did come were 203 episodes of one of the best sitcoms TV has ever seen, a show that cemented her name in pop culture and eventually led her to be able to negotiate a stunning CBS salary for the final seasons. And that’s not counting all that rerun money.
Not too bad for a girl who was just looking for health insurance.
