‘Big Bang Theory’ creator Chuck Lorre reveals biggest regret with Kaley Cuoco’s Penny

nypost.com:

Chuck Lorre has started off the podcast confessions with a bang.“The Big Bang Theory” co-creator, 72, revealed a regret of his when it came to Kaley Cuoco’s character, Penny, on the series, which ran from 2007 to 2019 on CBS.“We had so many episodes to go before we started to understand that there was a brilliance to Penny’s character that we had not explored,” Lorre said while on the first-ever episode of “The Official Big Bang Theory Podcast” on Monday.The series followed best friends, roommates and physicists Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) and Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg).“We did the very cliché in the beginning, you know, goofy blond who says foolish things.

It’s a clichéd character, right? And we missed it,” Lorre told host Jessica Radloff. “We didn’t have that right away that what she brought to this series, to these other characters, was an intelligence that was alien to them, you know, intelligence about people and relationships and family.”Although Penny appeared on all 12 seasons, she never had a last name until she married Leonard during Season 9.As Lorre put it, “It was built in that the scientists of the show didn’t understand how to be with people.

She did. She brought a humanity to them that they were lacking and that took a while to figure out. Certainly in the beginning, she was sadly one-dimensional.”Prior to Cuoco, 39, Amanda Walsh was cast to play Katie, “a street-hardened tough-as-nails woman with a vulnerable interior” in the 2006 pilot that never aired.The 43-year-old didn’t move forward in the role after the test audience “hated” Katie and her “toxic presence.”The pilot was then reshot in 2007 with a new cast, including Penny, Howard and Rajesh Koothrappali.