Christine Baranski absolutely rocks, and that’s a fact. Ever since the 1980s, Baranski has been a staple of the screen and stage, winning her first Emmy for playing the hard-drinking sidekick Maryann Thorpe on “Cybill” and two Tony awards as of this writing (for Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” in 1984 and Neil Simon’s “Rumors” in 1989). You might know her from the “Mamma Mia!” movies, as Diane Lockhart on either “The Good Wife” or “The Good Fight,” or from HBO’s luxurious drama “The Gilded Age,” but fans of “The Big Bang Theory” know that she played Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who’s the mother of Johnny Galecki’s Leonard Hofstadter, on the series. Baranski ultimately picked up four Emmy nominations for the guest role, but how did she get involved in the first place?
In Jessica Radloff’s 2022 book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” executive producer Lee Aronsohn talked about introducing Beverly in season 2 of the series … and why Baranski joined the show. “Chuck [Lorre] and I had worked with Christine on ‘Cybill’ and loved her,” Aronsohn explained, and yes, Lorre also created “Cybill” back in the day. “We knew the woman’s rhythms. We knew what she could knock out of the park. So, we gave her some juicy slowballs right over the plate and she hit them out.”
“My association with Chuck Lorre changed my career,” Baranski said, speaking to Radloff for the book. “I owe a lot to him, so when he came knocking on my door for ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and I read the [script for Beverly], I thought, Oh, okay, I know how to do this. Just like Maryann on ‘Cybill,’ she was another really terrific lady with these drippy one-liners. And a very different character, which was great.”
Baranski went on to say that ultimately, working with such fresh actors was also a huge draw. “But what intrigued me about [the show], and still one of the reasons I’m happy I did it, was those young actors,” she mused. “They are super famous now, but they weren’t famous back then. Nobody knew those names. They were all just young, and the show was so original.”
“And when I came on the show, ‘Big Bang’ was hot,” Baranski continued, speaking to the series’ enduring legacy. “But then as I continued over the years to come on, it simply became a mega hit, a cult hit. And for me, nothing but joy. Even now, when I’m on vacation in Florence or in Dublin, people will approach me and say, ‘Are you Leonard’s mother?'”
Kaley Cuoco and Christine Baranski ended up bonding intensely on the set of The Big Bang Theory
Perhaps the funniest thing about Beverly’s character on “The Big Bang Theory” is just how blunt she is about relatively taboo topics. As a person who analyzes psyches for a living, Beverly is extremely upfront about everything, including and especially discussions about sex, and as a performer, Christine Baranski really leaned into this.
“All those references to body parts and all of it was just scientific data, you know, like talking about Leonard’s sex life, or about anybody’s sex life … that was her world,” Baranski told Jessica Radloff. “I certainly never played a character like that. The simpler and more direct you were with the character, the better. She spoke in declarative sentences.”
At the end of the day, Baranski said this just helped her delivery. “You didn’t have to try to be funny to be Beverly,” she shared. “You just have to be convinced of what you were saying. And say in as a matter-of-fact and dry a manner as possible. It would just land, and the audience would explode. [The hard part was] having to hold it for a very long laugh and keep a straight face.”
One might think that, as Leonard’s mom, Beverly would spend most of her scenes with Galecki … but she actually spent a lot of time with Kaley Cuoco’s Penny. Penny is, of course, Leonard’s on-again, off-again dream girl who eventually becomes his wife, and Cuoco told Radloff that she also figured she wouldn’t shoot a ton of scenes with Baranski. In the end, she was thrilled. “She has such an intimidating presence, but she’s so the opposite of that,” Cuoco said of her unexpected scene partner. “She cracked me up, and it was an honor to have so many great scenes with her.”
Baranski, for her part, said that the bond between her and Cuoco really deepened after they worked on “The Maternal Congruence,” a season 3 episode where Penny tries to get Beverly to loosen up by taking her out drinking. As Baranski told Radloff, extensive rewrites took place while they were shooting this scene, which left the two actors with a lot of time to spend together … and brought them closer than ever. Apparently, Baranski loved forming this relationship, especially because Beverly and Penny went on to share a lot of scenes going forward. “Later in the series, there was this girlfriend relationship between Penny and Beverly, and that to me was just so great,” Baranski shared. “There were so many one-liners that I just thought were so pissingly funny. And so many touching moments. To make all of those characters not only highly intelligent and funny, but so human, so lovable. Even Beverly. Even Beverly.”
A Big Bang Theory scene with Christine Baranski is one of the most impactful in the entire show
To say that Leonard and Beverly have a tough relationship is an understatement, especially when you consider that we learn, eventually, that Beverly used a lot of Leonard’s childhood as fodder for her psychiatry books. Finally, near the very end of “The Big Bang Theory,” Beverly and Leonard dealt with their difficult bond and talked things out, with Beverly asking for Leonard’s forgiveness for the way she parented him. As Johnny Galecki told Jessica Radloff, filming that scene was quite intense … and incredibly rewarding.
As Galecki put it, working on such a broad comedy made this scene a major highlight. “[To] be able to create that kind of a mood shift on that stage after so much laughter for so long was really stilling,” he explained. “It’s much harder to make people laugh than it is to make people cry. But both Baranski and I felt the writers were trusting us with something special, so we wanted to meet that trust tenfold.”
Ultimately, this scene is about Leonard and Beverly attempting to mend their fractured relationship, and it took Galecki a minute to fully understand it. “And I actually didn’t understand that last scene with me and Christine at first,” he admitted. “It was one of the few scenes in a multi-camera sitcom that didn’t end on a joke. I kept thinking, Where’s the punchline? And I realized there wasn’t one. I realized the tone that they were giving us. And I mean ‘giving us’ because I really feel like that episode was the writers’ gifts to me at the end of the show.”
Baranski had nothing but fond memories of the scene as well. “It’s really a great payoff to play characters like that — ones that are emotionally very closed, because when they do open up, the audience is just like, Oh God, I knew there was a person there, I knew this was the other side of her,'” she said. “When that scene finally came, it was really poignant.”
At the end of the day, Baranski also said she’ll follow Chuck Lorre anywhere. “One of the proudest things I’ve ever done is be part of that show,” she mused. “Chuck is a huge linchpin in my career and my success. I would do anything for him.” Maybe she’ll end up in a future “Big Bang Theory” project, but in case that doesn’t ever come to pass, you can watch Baranski’s performance as Dr. Beverly Hofstadter on “The Big Bang Theory” on HBO Max.
