The Big Bang Theory prank that landed Kaley Cuoco in the hospital

Sometimes real-life accidents prevent actors from appearing in projects, such as “The Big Bang Theory.” Kaley Cuoco missed two episodes as Penny due to a real (and very serious) injury she suffered while horseback riding.. According to Jessica Radloff’s book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” which hits shelves in 2022, Cuoco and her co-star Johnny Galecki, who plays Penny Leonard Hofstadter’s on-again, off-again love interest in series, planned a prank in which they would perform a fake punch. Unfortunately for literally everyonewent terribly wrong.

The prank in question takes place in the season 6 episode “The Tangible Affection Proof”, where a very angry Penny is having Valentine’s Day dinner with Leonard and her friends Bernadette Rostenkowski (Melissa Rauch) and Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg). ). “We were doing this scene where Leonard and Penny are arguing at the dinner table, and we told the first publicity director, Anthony Rich, that we had a joke and we were going to do it,” Cuoco recalled to Radloff. “This wouldn’t be funny today, but it was really funny at the time, or so we thought, when our argument was getting really heated, and Johnny was fake punching me and I was going to fall off the camera. So we do it and it’s it escalates a lot, and Johnny comes towards me and…”

“And it landed under the table,” Galecki continued. “And then I started pretending to stomp on his face.”

Rauch added that Cucco “got up from the table with blood on his head, I thought it was fake blood for a second.” It turns out that the blood was It’s not fake at all.

As Kaley Cuoco told Jessica Radloff, at first no one realized anything was wrong (they even laughed at the well-organized prank) until she got up from the table and was bleeding. quite strongly.

Director Mark Cendrowski correctly noted that cuts to a person’s head or face can bleed. quiteso it looked very, very bad at the time and to make matters worse, production couldn’t even fix the problem. “Any cut on the head bleeds a lot more, but she was cut just below her eyebrow,” Cendrowski recalls. “It immediately started to swell, so we applied pressure and ice; the makeup team even tried to cover it up, but it kept bleeding. We were just trying to joke, but wow, we went too far with that.”

Well, this all sounds pretty bad, and from there, everything started to change. worse! Kaley Cuoco told Jessica Radloff that not only was she bleeding a lot, but the flow showed no signs of slowing down at all. “I wouldn’t stop bleeding!” Cuoco recalled. “At 7 p.m., I had to go to a plastic surgeon to get it stitched. The next day, on set there were all these signs saying things like, ‘No more pranks! No more violence!’ I mean, we thought it was really funny, but no one else did it. And then we had to re-block the scene on the couch after Leonard and I were having dinner, and I was sitting in front of him, so they turned me down. bangs to cover the stitches so you couldn’t see what had happened. It was very embarrassing and the whole thing was a total nightmare.”

The fact that the team put up signs saying that no one was allowed to prank or “brutal” is certainly pretty funny, although it’s much more serious than some of the other “rules” of the series. including that men were not supposed to grow beards during filming – but according to Mark Cendrowski, creating the episode after Cuoco’s injury was a total pain… because the actress’s battle scars were clearly visible. Not only that, but Cendrowski said the episode ultimately required special effects. “Yes, I tried to avoid filming it directly when we were able to film it again the next day because you could see the swelling,” Cendrowski revealed, adding that any swelling was taken care of in post-production.

“The Big Bang Theory” is streaming on Max now, so go watch “The Tangible Affection Proof” and see if you can spot any weird angles thanks to Cuoco’s injury.