What Happened To The Cast Of The Big Bang Theory?

“The Big Bang Theory” ran for 12 seasons and the same number of years — from 2007 to 2019, to be precise — and fans still love Chuck Lorre’s sitcoms about a gang of (somewhat) lovable nerds even though this one has been off the airwaves for some time now. (Seriously, they love them; the show’s first spin-off and prequel “Young Sheldon” was a resounding success and recently got its own spin-off, “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” and another spin-off with some supporting players will eventually head to the Max streaming service.) The success of “The Big Bang Theory” is unquestionably due to the show’s outstanding cast, as every single series regular brought something genuinely special to their individual roles, and the chemistry between the main characters is definitely what made people tune into the show week after week.

So what has the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” been doing since the show came to a close in the spring of 2019? They’re a pretty talented bunch, so you probably won’t be surprised to learn that pretty much all of them have stayed booked and busy in Hollywood. Still, I’m here to provide updates on the stars of this well-loved show, so here’s what the main cast of “The Big Bang Theory” is doing now.

It could be argued — and I would argue — that despite being surrounded by a talented ensemble cast, Jim Parsons’ Sheldon Cooper is the face of “The Big Bang Theory.” The clearly neurodivergent, brilliant, and often aggravating theoretical physicist begins the show living with his best friend Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and annoying most of his friends by, honestly, just kind of being mean to them … but to be fair, Sheldon does evolve throughout the course of the show. He forms a genuine romantic connection with Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik), a neuroscientist who’s just as socially awkward as he is. He also becomes best friends with Penny (Kaley Cuoco), his polar opposite who somehow manages to draw Sheldon out of his, uh, shell. So what has Parsons been up to recently?

After making the decision to leave “The Big Bang Theory” after season 12 — which resulted in the show itself ending — Parsons has largely returned to the stage. Since 2019, he’s appeared in huge Broadway (and off-Broadway) productions like “A Man of No Importance,” “Mother Play,” and a 2024 production of Thornton Wilder’s classic “Our Town,” and he also led the movie version of the play “The Boys in the Band” (which ran in 2018). He’s also continued playing Sheldon on “Young Sheldon” on the small screen, and in 2020, he worked with showrunner Ryan Murphy on the miniseries “Hollywood.”

As Sheldon’s long-suffering pal Leonard Hofstadter, Johnny Galecki spends a lot of his time on “The Big Bang Theory” looking exasperated, but to be really frank, he sort of deserves a life of frustration. Leonard’s on-again, off-again relationship with Penny — which ends with them married and expecting a baby — has its sweet moments, but Leonard’s superiority complex often gets in his own way, resulting in a frustrating on-screen depiction of a couple from radically different backgrounds trying to make it work. So what about Galecki? Has he kept acting since he played the resident experimental physicist on “The Big Bang Theory?”

Not really! Even though Galecki reprised his role as David Healy from another beloved sitcom, “Roseanne,” in both its 2018 sitcom and the ensuing spin-off “The Conners” (which began after Roseanne Barr was cut from her own show), he basically lives off the grid in Nashville now with his wife Morgan. At least he doesn’t have to pretend to eat Chinese food on television anymore.

In the first-ever episode of “The Big Bang Theory,” Leonard and Sheldon both have strong reactions to the arrival of Penny, a girl with no apparent last name who moves into the apartment across the hall from the boys. Sheldon is irritated, but Leonard is immediately smitten — he muses that their babies will be “smart and beautiful” — and spends the rest of the series pursuing the gorgeous, outgoing Penny, who works at the Cheesecake Factory while she pursues her dream of becoming an actress. Penny, like Sheldon, changes quite a lot throughout “The Big Bang Theory,” eventually giving up on acting to pursue a lucrative job in the pharmaceutical industry; she also eventually marries Leonard, though I might argue that her most important relationship — despite the fact that it’s platonic — is her unlikely yet extremely close friendship with Sheldon. Penny serves as a sort of audience surrogate to make fun of the main guys when they get a little too “nerdy,” and Kaley Cuoco plays her perfectly.

Since “The Big Bang Theory” ended, an event that initially left Cuoco bereft and shocked, the actress and producer has continued working steadily, even creating her own projects. Her first post-Penny role came in “The Flight Attendant,” a Max drama that was unfortunately canceled after two seasons, and she followed that up with movies like “Meet Cute” and the true-crime TV comedy “Based on a True Story.” Since 2019, Cuoco has also led Max’s animated Harley Quinn series as the voice of the titular anti-heroine, which she also produces under the umbrella of her company Yes, Norman.

At first, it’s hard to like Howard Wolowitz, despite Simon Helberg’s obvious talent as a performer. Howard is first introduced as a sort of odious would-be womanizer who acts like an enormous creep around Penny (he gives her a teddy bear with a camera inside and drives a remote-controlled car topped with a camera under Penny’s skirt, as just two examples of his all-around weirdness). Eventually, Howard meets Bernadette Rostenkowski (Melissa Rauch) and settles down, makes huge strides professionally (he even goes to space), and stops acting like a sex pest, becoming a lot more likable in the process. Thankfully, Helberg kept acting after his time as Howard Wolowitz ended — and he’s proven that he’s capable of much more than, say, cracking jokes over a laugh track while wearing a silly belt buckle.

In 2021, Helberg joined the cast of Leos Carax’s English-language debut “Annette” as the conductor, providing one of the wonderfully bizarre film’s best setpieces in a one-take sequence of him working with an orchestra (and he wanted the role so badly that he actually got French citizenship through his wife to officially book it). On the small screen, Helberg has joined Jim Parsons and popped up on “Young Sheldon” and, in 2023, appeared in two episodes of Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne’s critically acclaimed crime comedy “Poker Face.”

It’s incredible that Kunal Nayyar narrowly missed out on “The Big Bang Theory” thanks to studio interference, and it just goes to show that creator Chuck Lorre was right to fight for the actor when it came to the lead role of Raj Koothrappali. Raj gets stuck with some weird hang-ups thanks to the show’s writers — his “selective mutism” around women that can only be cured by massive amounts of booze really isn’t that great — but Nayyar plays him with so much heart that you can’t help but root for him, especially as he desperately tries to find love in all the wrong places. Another unfortunate thing about Raj’s trajectory is that, despite his nature as a hopeless romantic who always cries when he watches “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” he ends the series completely alone. So what about Nayyar? What did he do after ending his run as Raj?

Since playing Raj, Nayyar has pivoted a bit to more serious roles, especially his dark turn in the Apple TV+ drama “Suspicion” in 2022 — but he also made time to show up on his former coworker Melissa Rauch’s reboot of “Night Court” (we’ll circle back to that project in a moment). On the features side of things, Nayyar has lent his voice to the “Trolls” movies and he appeared in the Netflix film “Spaceman,” where he appeared alongside Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan.

Melissa Rauch’s bossy, squeaky-voiced Bernadette Rostenkowski doesn’t even appear in “The Big Bang Theory” until its third season as a recurring character, and she wasn’t meant to stick around for long — but thankfully, she did. Bernadette, who eventually marries Howard and has two kids with him, is the perfect foil for Simon Helberg’s character, and she also provides much-needed female companionship for Penny alongside Mayim Bialik’s Amy Farrah Fowler (more on her soon). Bernadette works at the Cheesecake Factory with Penny at first but ultimately completes her graduate degree in microbiology and starts a high-paying job at the fictional pharmaceutical company ZenGen (she gets Penny a job there in the show’s later seasons). 

Rauch has remained a small-screen staple since her time on “The Big Bang Theory.” After she became a series regular in the fourth season, Rauch continued on the show until its very end before appearing in two films released in 2019, the romantic comedy “Ode to Joy” and Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy “The Laundromat” alongside Meryl Streep. Since 2023, Rauch has also led the NBC reboot of the courtroom comedy “Night Court” alongside its original star John Larroquette, so it seems like she’ll be sticking around on TV sitcoms for a while.

Like Bernadette, Amy Farrah Fowler doesn’t show up on “The Big Bang Theory” until season 3, but she also becomes a series regular in the show’s fourth season and proves that she’s an indispensable character. When the audience first meets Amy, she agrees to an online date with Sheldon (mostly so her mother will stop asking if she’s dating anyone), but the two turn out to be a lot alike, and they hit it off. Sheldon certainly doesn’t open up to Amy right away, but he does eventually, giving her a key and even agreeing to acts of physical affection (though he does take that part incredibly slowly). Plus, Amy forms a tight friendship with Penny and Bernadette, giving “The Big Bang Theory” a much-needed boost of feminine energy after forcing Penny to be the only woman in the main cast for the show’s first three seasons.

A pretty cool aspect of Mayim Bialik’s character on “The Big Bang Theory” is that she brings real-life experience to her role; both Bialik and Amy are neuroscientists, making her the only main cast member to actually study the science discussed on the series. Like Simon Helberg and Jim Parsons, Bialik has appeared briefly on “Young Sheldon” as Amy, and from 2021 to 2023, she played the title role on the Fox sitcom “Call Me Kat” (which Parsons produced). Bialik also briefly served as a host of the long-running game show “Jeopardy!” alongside Ken Jennings, but left her hosting duties behind in 2023.

It’s a shame that Sara Gilbert didn’t get more play as Leslie Winkle on “The Big Bang Theory.” Sccording to an inside report from Entertainment Weekly in 2009, Gilbert lost her role as a series regular after season 2 because the writers couldn’t figure out how to effectively utilize her character. In seasons 1 and 2 (though she also appears as a guest star in seasons 3 and 9), Leslie works alongside the guys at the prestigious California Institute of Technology as an experimental physicist, sharing a lab with her fellow experimental physicist Leonard — though that’s not all she shares with Leonard. Actually, Leslie hooks up with both Leonard and Howard during her brief time on the series, which probably explains why she got written off just in time for those two to form actual romantic relationships with Penny and Bernadette, respectively.

Gilbert, who also appeared on “Roseanne” with Johnny Galecki, also returned to the reboot and “The Conners” as Darlene Conner-Healy, and in 2019, she played a recurring role on the Netflix original series “Atypical.” As far as the big screen is concerned, Gilbert’s resume is much shorter — she mostly sticks to television — but she did find time to appear in the ensemble comedy “80 for Brady” in 2023.

When Kevin Sussman first auditioned for “The Big Bang Theory,” he went out for the role of Howard Wolowitz … but luckily for him, the show’s creative team liked him so much that they created the supporting role of Stuart Bloom just for him. (To be absolutely fair to Sussman, he was actually all set to play Howard before a scheduling conflict with ABC’s “Ugly Betty” made that situation impossible.) As a recurring character at first, Stuart runs the comic book store frequented by the main gang, but later on in the series Sussman joined as a series regular as he got more involved in the lives of the main characters, especially Howard and Bernadette. (Howard hires Stuart to help take care of his elderly mother, and after her death, Stuart helps out with Bernadette and Howard’s two children.) 

Sussman appeared on a pretty wide variety of TV shows after “The Big Bang Theory” concluded, including Amanda Seyfried’s award-winning Hulu miniseries “The Dropout” and his former co-star Mayim Bialik’s aforementioned sitcom “Call Me Kat.” After showing up on two episodes of “Better Call Saul” in 2022, Sussman made a bigger splash the following year with a major role in Apple TV+’s miniseries “Lessons in Chemistry,” which casts him as a meek yet determined TV executive forced to wrangle a brilliant scientist turned home cooking instructor named Elizabeth Zott (Oscar winner Brie Larson). Plus, Sussman is set to return for that Max spin-off — so it looks like he’ll be back in the “Big Bang” universe soon.

“The Big Bang Theory” is available to stream on Max now.