Kaley Cuoco began starring in HBO Max's The Flight Attendant in November of last year, when the series made its debut. However, unlike other projects, she found herself at odds with a particular set of scenes.
After taking on the role of Cassie Bowden, a flight attendant who makes a habit of drinking too much and sleeping with strangers, many of whom are passengers on her flight, Cuoco found herself struggling to deal with the many sex scenes she was having to film.
"I read The Flight Attendant and was hooked immediately!" Cuoco said of the project, via The Things. "Warner Bros. Television is my extended family and I'm so excited to work together and bring this amazing book to life with them."
As IMDb revealed in their synopsis of the thriller, Cuoco's character not only has alcoholic tendencies; she's also a potential murderer, who one day wakes up with a dead man and can't recall what happened the night before.
But that wasn't the most challenging aspect of filming the show.
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In a November 2020 interview with USA Today, Cuoco said that having to film sex scenes with one of her character's passengers turned lovers, played by Michiel Huisman, was a challenge for her, as previous love scenes were not nearly as intense.
"Network 8 o'clock TV is a little different than HBO Max all hours of the night. I had scenes like that on 'Big Bang,' but this was like a true sex scene. I told Michiel, 'I've never done this before. Have you done it before?' He goes, 'Yeah, like 30, 40 times.' And I was like, 'WHAT?'" Cuoco recalled
"So when they called action, I still wasn't really giving my all," she continued. "Michiel finally goes, 'It looks like you're hovering over a public toilet. What are you doing?' I'm like, 'I don't know what I'm doing.' So he had to awkwardly teach me how to have fake sex."
Speaking of the new role, Cuoco said it's like a "coming-out party."
"It gets quite dark, quite emotional," she admitted. "This is my way of pushing the door down and going, 'I can do more and I love doing more.'"
Amid production on HBO Max's The Flight Attendant, Cuoco, who typically abides by a "fly by the seat of my pants" approach to her acting roles, asked the series' director, Susanna Fogel, if she should trade in her "wing it" approach and prepare for each scene with more intent.
But Fogel didn't like that idea and advised her to stick with what she knows.
"And she said, 'Do not change one thing that has gotten you to this point,' " Cuoco recalled. "I almost cried. It was so freeing."
