Johnny Galecki Used A Wild Method To Act Drunk On The Big Bang Theory

Any actor will tell you that it's a tall order to convincingly play drunk; try too hard and you can come off as insincere, but it can also ring false if you don't go far enough with the act. According to Jessica Radloff's 2022 book "The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series," star Johnny Galecki, who played Leonard Hofstadter on Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady's beloved CBS sitcom for 12 years and the same number of seasons, had a tricky way to convincingly fake his intoxication.

"Acting drunk is really hard to play, so I would ask Scott London, our prop master, to cut up a dish sponge into pieces, soak it in whiskey, and put it in a disposable coffee cup with a lid on it and give it to me," Galecki revealed to Radloff in the book. I would just smell that to bring some sense memory in and kind of stumble around a little bit and loosen up, which helped me a great deal."

According to Galecki, his co-star (and, for a while during filming, his real-life girlfriend) Kaley Cuoco, who portrayed Penny on the series, thought he was absolutely ridiculous. "And Kaley, of course, thought I was crazy," he laughed. "But what's what Scott London and I did for every drunk scene from then on. He'd be like, 'Don't tell them I'm doing this for you!' And I'd say, 'Scott, it's shards of dish sponge! It's not like I'm sucking a few drops of whiskey out of these things!'"

This is, to be clear, a really wild way to fake being drunk, but if sense memory worked for Galecki, so be it! Clearly, it helped for his drunk scenes with Penny, including one that "Big Bang Theory" fans particularly love.

In the second season of "The Big Bang Theory," after Penny meets Leonard's imposing mother Dr. Beverly Hofstadter (played by the incredible Christine Baranski) for the first time, the two get drunk on tequila shots together ... and by the time they're nicely hammered, Penny comes up with a "creative" way for Leonard to take a shot. After telling him to lick salt off her neck and take the shot, she pops the lime into her mouth, which he takes from her when they kiss (though he promptly spits it to the side). As Kaley Cuoco told Radloff in the book, the two had a great time shooting this beloved scene.

"We pre-shot it, but we also did it in front of the audience," Cuoco recalled. "We were the last ones to shoot that day, and once we wrapped, Johnny said to me, 'Hey! That was really fun!' and I said, 'That was really fun! I had a blast with you.'" Cuoco continued:

"We had genuine, childlike fun doing some of those scenes, especially early on, when it was a lot more of those storylines. And we were dating then in real life, so I think it came a little easier to us than it needed to. There wasn't a lot of rehearsal, and I think we nailed it pretty quickly! But it was visually so funny with the lime sticking out, and then swapping the lime, and then laughing as our characters were drunk."

"The physical comedy of the scene was so fun," Johnny Galecki agreed. "It was also great to play Leonard in a position like that, which was probably the most pornographic thing he had ever experienced outside of maybe reading Sigmund Freud." This scene is a ton of fun, but I wish Galecki had some training for a different fake aspect of his job: eating.

Johnny Galecki is decent at playing drunk, so clearly, his whiskey-sponge trick worked. What he's terrible at is fake eating, and eating comes up a lot more on "The Big Bang Theory" than drinking anyway. In almost every single scene, the whole gang — Leonard, Penny, and their friends Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar), Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik), and Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch) sit around in Sheldon and Leonard's apartment eating. If you pay particular attention to Leonard, you might realize, as I did, that he looks bizarre. He's constantly holding his fork in a weird upside-down position, stirring his food like a kid trying to avoid eating vegetables, and just generally not even pretending to consume anything. Yes, I know that actors can't eat everything in front of them on set, but was Galecki too proud to request a spit bucket?!

I'll keep my grievance-airing about Galecki's bad fake eating to a minimum, mostly because I've already yelled about it at length in a previous article on our sister site Looper. I just wish he'd come up with a convincing way to chew and act drunk while starring on "The Big Bang Theory," which is available to stream now on HBO Max.