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Throughout 12 years and seasons of “The Big Bang Theory,” Simon Helberg, the actor who plays Howard Wolowitz, got to show off his considerable talents, from speaking multiple languages to celebrity impressions (no, really; the guy does everyone from Nicolas Cage to Christopher Walken to Stephen Hawking). So how did Helberg’s vocal stylings make it into the show in the first place? In an interview with Vulture after the show’s massively successful sixth season wrapped up, executive producer Steve Molaro spoke to the outlet about a handful of topics, including the romance between Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik), the end of Raj Koothrappali’s (Kunal Nayyar) selective mutism around women, and Howard’s Cage impression from the season’s penultimate episode “The Love Spell Potential.”
According to Molaro, the crew behind “The Big Bang Theory” knew that Helberg was a dab hand at impressions, so they simply wrote that into the show (in this particular episode, Howard is serving as the “DM,” or “dungeon master,” for a game of Dungeons & Dragons, so adding in silly voices actually makes perfect sense). “We had heard him do Nicolas Cage and we always thought that was really funny, so when we started going down that road we [asked him], ‘Who else do you think you can do here?'” Molaro told the outlet, going on to share a story about how the crew of the show would get together and play Dungeons & Dragons pretty frequently when they weren’t filming. But wait — how did they even know that Helberg was good at impressions in the first place?
Howard’s celebrity impressions are a running bit throughout The Big Bang Theory
Fans of “The Big Bang Theory” know that, throughout the series, Howard Wolowitz does a lot of celebrity impressions — and, point in fact, he also does impressions of his friends and loved ones, including Sheldon Cooper, Howard’s own wife Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch), the gang’s friend and comic book store owner Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman, who nearly played Howard in the first place), and more. In Jessica Radloff’s 2022 oral history “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” Simon Helberg revealed that the impressions were actually part of his audition, because creator Chuck Lorre knew his work from the short-lived series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”
“When I tested at CBS, [former Warner Bros. Television president and executive] Peter Roth was there, and Peter was having me do impressions for Chuck, because he knew I did all these impressions on ‘Studio 60.'” Ultimately, Helberg was cast, and his numerous talents were put to use; as he says later on in the book, he was handed several different acting challenges throughout the show.
“I had to learn [new languages] all for the show,” Helberg said after Radloff noted that he spoke Russian, French, and several others during the series’ run. “I had to speak Klingon at some point as well. Chuck spoke a little Russian, so I remember him helping me with that. I had to speak Mandarin, which was the hardest, but I loved doing it. It was very musical to learn a new language. But it was like they’d wheel in a trunk, open it and say, Let’s see what kind of tricks we can have Howard do … languages, magic, impressions, monkeys, animals?“
One of Howard Wolowitz’s best celebrity impressions actually caused a ruckus on the set of The Big Bang Theory
In the fifth season of “The Big Bang Theory,” Simon Helberg — and, by extension, Howard Wolowitz — came face to face with one of his most frequent impression subjects, the legendary scientist, author, and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. In that season’s “The Hawking Excitation,” Hawking actually shows up … and sees Simon do an impression of the computerized voice that Hawking famously used due to his lifelong battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
As director Mark Cendrowski revealed to Jessica Radloff in her book, Hawking gave everyone a tiny bit of a scare when he saw Helberg’s impression — which he watched because he was so excited about being on the series that he elected to watch rehearsals. After saying that an ambulance was on hold due to the professor’s ailing health, Cendrowski revealed, “When he came to our runthrough on the stage, it just so happened that Simon had to be doing an impression of him. Simon was like, ‘Oh my god.’ He did the scene and then immediately turned to Professor Hawking and said, ‘I’m so sorry! They made me do it!’ And everyone cracked up.”
That’s when something … unexpected happened. “But then a buzzer on his wheelchair went off, and we saw his handlers come in to move and check things, and we were so concerned,” Cendrowski continued. “My first thought was, Oh my god, Simon, you killed Stephen Hawking! But his handler assured us, ‘No, he was laughing!’ The only way he could communicate was off his glasses with a sensor on his cheek, so the buzzer would go off when he laughed. We were like, ‘Thank God!’ He just had the best time seeing behind the scenes of our world and how it was done. I still can’t believe it.”
“The Big Bang Theory,” including all of Howard’s impressions and the episode with Hawking, is streaming on Max now.
