Kaley Cuoco: Once the highest paid actress on television, she has never cared about fame. Now it matters even less

California-born actress Kaley Cuoco, 37, and her partner of the past year, actor Tom Pelphrey, 40, just welcomed their first child, a daughter named Matilda Carmine Richie. On April 1, the actress herself shared the news with her seven million-plus followers on her Instagram page, showing photographs of the newborn and the couple. “Introducing Matilda Carmine Richie Pelphrey, the new light of our lives!” wrote the actress. “We are overjoyed and grateful for this little miracle. Thank you to the doctors, nurses, family and friends who have helped us immensely over the last few days. We are blessed beyond belief. [Tom,] [I] didn’t think I could fall even more in love with you, but I did,” stated the actress who rose to fame playing Penny on The Big Bang Theory.

Scarcely four years have passed since she left the show with which she found such international success. Her life has changed a great deal since then. Now she is the producer and star of the series The Flight Attendant, an unexpected hit that changed the public’s image of her and brought her back to the Emmys and the Golden Globes. Last year, she starred in the dramatic comedy An Almost Perfect Date with Pete Davidson and in the thriller The Man from Toronto with Woody Harrelson. But nothing defined 2022 for her more than waiting for little Matilda to arrive.

On October 11, 2022, the actress announced that she was expecting a baby with her boyfriend, Tom Pelphrey, the New Jersey-born actor known for his work on the series Ozark: “Baby girl Pelphrey coming 2023,″ she announced with photos full of little hearts in a post on Instagram, where she isn’t usually very active. She said that “she was beyond blessed and over the moon” in a message expressing her love for her partner, who responded with similarly loving posts on the same social media site. It was surprising news, because, as Cuoco herself said in an interview with USA Today, she and Pelphrey had only met in April 2022: “It was love at first sight,” the actress explained. The couple made their relationship “Instagram official” in May of that same year.

The actress decided to share every step of her pregnancy with her followers—posing constantly with her partner, caressing her growing belly and showcasing her new silhouette. She also shared less idyllic moments. For instance, she talked about the terrible morning sickness she suffered during her first trimester, which she tried to convey by using the green nauseated emoji on one of her Instagram stories (a format she uses more than posts). As if she needed to clarify the point, her post included a photo of herself curled up on the bed in her dressing room. In between internet giggles, she noted that “This was every day between setups lol.” Another story was addressed to her body double, Monette Moio, with whom she posed face to face—Cuoco with a belly; Moio without one—to whom she said: “Remember that time we shot an action film while I was pregnant and horribly sick and you had to take care of me and be me and do all the things as non-pregnant me?!?” That comment seems to refer to the film Role Play; according to iMDB, it’s the only work in her filmography scheduled for release in the near future. Reportedly, she will join the cast of the show Based on a True Story, although it still doesn’t have a premiere date. Otherwise, she has nothing in the works, other than new motherhood.

Clearly, Cuoco has artistic talent. If the end of The Big Bang Theory after 12 years of success, called into question the professional future of its actors (who could easily be eclipsed by the popularity of their characters), Cuoco proved that she could pass the test with flying colors. She produced and starred in The Flight Attendant, for which she was nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy; it is still unclear whether there will be a third season of the show.

Competitive by nature, Cuoco told herself that if others could produce a show, so could she. “The first thing I asked was, ‘Has Reese Witherspoon gotten the rights to this book?’” she said at the premiere of The Flight Attendant. When she learned that the rights were available, Cuoco made the show the first project for her production company, Yes, Norman Productions (she chose the name in honor of her dog, Norman). The series not only introduced her to a more adult audience but it posed new acting challenges, like doing her first sex scenes (“Thank God [it was] very private, because we were in our Covid bubble,” she told EL PAIS about her work with Michiel Huisman). She also had a child actor on-set who played her character’s younger self, and she had a maternal relationship with the young actress. “I’m not used to being around children. I’ve never played a mother and I’m usually the little one on set. So, working with young Cassie (Audrey Grace Marshall) took me back to the [days] when I would go to the set with my mother.” Cuoco herself began as an actress at five years old and starred in Barbie and Oscar Mayer commercials.

The actress has been married twice, first to tennis player Ryan Sweeting and then to jockey Karl Cook, whom she divorced in June 2021 (and scrubbed from her social media). Cuoco has an extensive list of past loves, including her castmate from The Big Bang Theory Johnny Galecki and Henry Cavill, the most recent Superman. She quickly fell in love with Pelphrey when her manager took her to the premiere of the show Ozark to introduce her to another client, Tom. It was “something very Hollywood,” she told the media about the love-at-first-sight romance, which pulled her out of what she has publicly described as one of the worst times of her life after her second divorce.

Cuoco, who became the highest paid actress on television, is aware of how fleeting success and even work can be in the entertainment industry, though she continues her voice-over work on the animated series Harley Quinn and is broadening her horizons as a producer. “You go on to be irrelevant in anything. There are so many actors [who are] so good... That’s why I’ve never felt comfortable taking a break. I like to work, and I know how this business works; it can close the door on you at any moment. I don’t want that to happen because I’m deeply in love with my work.” Perhaps that’s why Cuoco thanked her trainer profusely on the internet for keeping her in shape with “super hard prenatal exercises.”

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