This unique talent helped Kaley Cuoco learn all her lines from The Big Bang Theory

Every actor has their own process when it comes to learning a line and performing a role — and apparently Kaley Cuoco had a particularly interesting process on The Big Bang Theory . In particular, her time as the original female lead Penny was mostly effortless, and it drove some of her co-stars and co-stars crazy (in the best possible way) — and she potentially came on set armed with a photographic memory.

Cuoco and her co-stars never tell Jessica Radloff who wrote the 2022 book”The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive Story of the Epic Hit” — that Cuoco has an eidetic memory, but that certainly comes from the fact that people who worked with Cuoco say she didn’t even touch her script. As series creator Chuck Lorre said, “Kaley would read cold and knocked it out of the park. She was flying by the seat of her pants, but she didn’t stop there. She always worked. She made it look easy, which is part of the genius. That’s when you know there’s a lot of work going on.”

Former Warner Bros. president Peter Roth, who was incredibly involved with The Big Bang Theory and often spent time on set, agreed. “At every table read, I sat across from Jim (Parsons, who played Sheldon Cooper) and Kaylee,” he recalled. “I remember going up to Kaylee and saying, ‘When you get the scripts, you should spend a lot of time re-reading them and pitching them,’ and she said, ‘No, I’ve never read them.’ I said, “Wait, you’re telling me this is a bad read?!” and she said, “Yeah, that’s just what I do.” I swear, when you saw Kaley Cuoco reading at that table, it was perfect, her timing was so flawless.’

One can imagine that watching Kaley Cuoco effortlessly sail through dense, dialogue-heavy scenes in The Big Bang Theory was potentially frustrating, especially since her character doesn’t often have to voice scientific facts. Even when the writers tricked her into doing just that, she pulled it off, according to her co-star, on-screen boyfriend-turned-husband and one-time real-life boyfriend Johnny Galecki (who played Leonard Hofstadter on the series). Galecki also said that their colleague Simon Helberg, who played Howard Wolowitzwas perplexed by Kuok’s process.

“Oh shit, that was so annoying,” Galecki told Jessica Radloff. “I remember there was a speech that the writers wrote for her as a dare that was at least a full page if not more and it was all physical jargon and she just nailed it. As Simon once said, she doesn’t even open the script, she just puts her hand on it and osmosis absorbs it, and it’s amazing.”

Perhaps the craziest part of Galecki’s memoir is what happened in Cuoco’s house. “I walked up to her house and walked through the gate, and there were three feet of scripts piled up so high from production assistants throwing them through the gate,” Galecki said. “And she never opened them! I mean, months‘ worth of scripts lying in her yard. And yet she always knew her lines. I would study these lines so much. Whatever process Kayleigh is involved in, and sometimes the lack of it, she knows exactly what she’s going to do to make things shiny and bright, thanks to her own instincts. She is an anomaly.”

As for Kaley Cuoco, it’s all pretty funny — which makes sense, considering she’s apparently barely had to prepare for her scenes – even though she also said that Chuck Lorre still has doubts about the case. “Chuck still didn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t prepare for our table readings,” Cuoco said in Jessica Radloff’s book. “One time I even said to him, ‘I’m sorry, do you think that after I shoot on Tuesday night, I go home and rehearse the script on Wednesday?’ He says, “Yeah, I think so?” I said, “Well, it’s not, I hate to tell you!”

In reality, though, Cuoco said she went through so many rehearsals as Penny that it was just easy to learn the dialogue — and that she felt really related to her character. “The lowdown is that our scripts don’t change a ton from the time we get to them to the time we shoot the episode, so we rehearsed for a week and then blocked on Monday, and it just seeped into my the memory of it all,” Cuoco said. “Besides, I knew Penny so well, I knew what she was going to say before I even read it. I was just me in Penny and she was a part of me.’

The Big Bang Theory, including Cuoco’s masterful performance as Penny, is now on Max.