The Big Bang Theory: Are Kaley Cuoco And Mayim Bialik Friends In Real Life? Kaley Cuoco and Mayim Bialik are two very important pieces in one of our favorite TV shows ever — The Big Bang Theory. As Penny and Amy, respectively, these two characters are opposites, but click in their Los Angeles friend group. The two shared the screen for around 200 episodes between 2010 and 2019 when the show wrapped for good, so we can’t help but wonder if the actresses are friends in real life, too. To find out, we did some digging.
The biggest tip that Cuoco and Bialik are truly friends outside of Big Bang Theory is how they handled their salaries. In 2017, the main cast, which included Cuoco and Bialik, was dealing with salary negotiations, per Variety. Bialik and Melissa Rauch were fighting to get their salaries brought up to par with the main five cast members who had been there from the beginning — Cuoco, Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Simon Helberg, and Kunal Nayyar. Rauch and Bialik were reportedly making less money than the other five ($200,000 per episode, compared to $1 million), so contracts for the final two seasons were held up.
In an act of friendship and respect, all five original cast members offered up pay cuts to help close the pay gap for Bialik and Rauch. Even if Cuoco and Bialik aren’t best friends for life, we’d say they’re, at the very least, good friends, especially for Cuoco to offer up a reported $100,000 per episode of her pay.
Mayim Bialik called the ‘Big Bang Theory’ cast ‘cohesive’
It’s hard to say if it was always rainbows and butterflies between The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco and Mayim Bialik, though. Rumors floated around from Radar Online in 2018 about catfights on set between Cuoco and Bialik, but Gossip Cop squashed them pretty quickly. Bialik’s rep even told Gossip Cop at the time, “There’s no truth to this story whatsoever.” So it sounds like those rumors were just that — rumors.
The supposed drama was never even reported by other outlets either and the speculation on the “catfights” disappeared quickly. What was covered, though, was the cast’s bond on set and off. Bialik even told People in 2017, “I’m happy to report that we have a very cohesive cast and we all know that our strength is together.”
And while these two don’t post a ton of pictures together on social media, they still hang out. Bialik shared a photo with Cuoco and her sister in January 2020 on Instagram. With the photo, she wrote, “2020 starting strong for celebrity sightings – omg it’s @kaleycuoco.” So if nothing else, Bialik and Cuoco are at least friendly enough to grab coffee from time to time.
