The Big Bang Theory Star Says People Constantly Told Him, “I Hate Your Show”

Running for 12 seasons on CBS, The Big Bang Theory was a popular series. The sitcom, which ended its run in 2019, was a big success for the network as it followed the lives of nerdy Caltech physicists Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), their aspiring actress neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco), and their nerdy friends and co-workers aerospace engineer Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and astrophysicist Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar). But while the show was a hit, the series was also widely criticized with many professing a dislike for the show. Now, nearly three years after the show’s finale, Helberg opens up about people’s hatred for the series, sharing that while they often told him how much they disliked Big Bang Theory, it seemed to him that they were actually big fans.

Helberg spoke about the interesting fan encounters he had during a recent episode of Big Bang co-star Mayim Bialik’s podcast, Bialik Breakdown (via Screen Rant), and explained that while people would openly tell him that they hated the show, it was also pretty clear that they didn’t.

“The introduction that people tend to make to me, particularly when the show was on, they would come up and they would say, ‘Listen, I hate your show.’ That’s the way they would start talking to me,” Helberg said. “Like, I mean every day.  ‘I f-cking can’t stand your show man, but my…’ and it would be fill in the blank, ‘my uncle, my brother, my bus driver from high school, my rabbi, my dentist, my whatever’ and I was sort of like, you are all of these people, aren’t you? There is no other, you don’t have… this is not about your ophthalmologist. You like the show. No, maybe you don’t. But they come up, and I started getting very angry.”

Helberg went on to say that some of the same people who expressed to him their hatred for the show would then turn around and ask things of him. He specifically spoke about being asked to buy coffee for someone who had just told him that they couldn’t stand The Big Bang Theory.

So, a guy comes up and goes, ‘I can’t stand it, but my roommate loves it so it’s on in the background and anyway I read about your negotiations. Wanna buy me a cup of coffee?’ And I was like ‘Yeah, you had me at you hate my show. Would you like a bagel to go with that?”

Since the end of The Big Bang Theory, the show’s stars have been opening up about their experiences making the series. In addition to Helberg’s experiences with fans claiming not to be fans, Nayyar has also opened up with some behind-the-scenes secrets about how the popular sitcom was made, including one particularly gross detail that he revealed earlier this year. Back in January, the actor explained how they filmed scenes that showed the characters going up and down stairs, revealing that co-star Johnny Galecki had a specific spot he’d put his chewing gum during filming.

“The way it works is you go down the stairs and then they yell, ‘Hold’,” Nayyar explained of the stairs on the set that went “nowhere”. “They change the scenery from like if the apartment says 1a it suddenly says 2a or 3. They change the set, so it looks exactly like another floor.”

He continued, “You run back up the stairs, that go nowhere, and then you walk back down as if it’s a new floor. Down there is nothing. There’s a wall there where Johnny Galecki, for 12 years, would stick his chewing gum on. I’m not joking. So, if any of you are Johnny Galecki fans and you want his dried chewing gum, I am sure it’s for sale somewhere on the internet. Welcome to Hollywood.”

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