HBO's 'Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness' was "such a secret" before getting to set, Kaley Cuoco tells PEOPLE
Credit: HBO Max
Warning: This article contains spoilers for episode 2 of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, now streaming on HBO Max.
NEED TO KNOW
- Kaley Cuoco appears in the second episode of HBO’s Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness
- Joining the Larry David-led sketch series was an easy decision for her, she tells PEOPLE, though she had no idea she’d be transported back to the Great Depression
- “I had no idea what the premise was. I didn’t even know it was in another time. But Larry and I have an amazing rapport,” she says
Kaley Cuoco didn't know she'd be shaming Larry David for cutting a soup line in 1930s America, but that's exactly where Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness took her.
In David's comedic retelling of American history on HBO, the Emmy and Golden Globe nominee appears as a woman named Gloria in a second-episode “Great Depression" sketch.
It's one outrageous segment of many in the sketch-comedy series from the Curb Your Enthusiasm mastermind, but as Cuoco shares, all she needed to know before signing up was that David, 79, was involved.
A Curb alum herself (she guest-starred as the girlfriend of Vince Vaughn's Freddy Funkhouser in 2021), Cuoco tells PEOPLE that after her "bucket-list" appearance on the previous show, she jumped at the chance to "run in that circle again."
"It was such a secretive thing. I just said yes before the producers could tell me what it was," Cuoco says of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. "I was like, 'Anything for Larry.' I had no idea what the premise was. I didn't even know it was in another time. But Larry and I have an amazing rapport. He's really sweet to me and we find each other very funny."
Credit: HBO Max
When Cuoco showed up to what looked like a "big film set" with period-appropriate costumes, she finally got the rundown.
"They're like, 'Okay, you're going to be in the Great Depression.' I was like, 'Wait, what?' I'm like, 'What is this show? What are you talking about? What do you mean?' They're like, 'Oh yeah, and the Obamas are producing.' I was like, 'Wait, what?' I knew nothing. I knew absolutely nothing."
In the second episode of the show, which is indeed executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, an unemployed, Depression-era David has to wait in line for servings of soup and bread.
Within minutes, he's accusing a man of pulling off a "chat and cut" (approaching someone he knows in line to cut in front of others), complaining about the lack of salt in his soup and questioning why he wasn't mentioned in the suicide note of a man named Stu. After losing his spot in line due to a bread mixup, David then gets accused of trying a "chat and cut" of his own when he finds Gloria (Stu's significant other, played by Cuoco) waiting in the line too. But she isn't putting up with his antics.
"He was like, 'Call me something. Just call me an imbecile or call me dumb [or] something.' So I called him an imbecile and he literally just spit out. … He was laughing so hard," Cuoco recalls of their scene. "It's so fun when he finds you funny. You literally think you won a medal."
Cuoco herself isn't too keen on the "chat and cut" maneuver. "The chat and cut is f—ed up. You can't do that," she jokes. "I wasn't surprised that that was something that he was trying to do. That's an absolute no-no. I don't care if we're in the Great Depression or in a line today for Taco Bell. You can't do that."
Credit: HBO Max
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After a few laughs filming and after the show's premiere in Los Angeles last month, Cuoco got a call from David while she was — ironically enough — waiting in line at a department store.
"I'd been standing in line for 20 minutes, I didn't care. I'm like, 'Oh my God, Larry David is calling me,'" she says. "So I go in the corner and he goes, 'I just wanted to tell you that you were great last night and we're so glad you were there.' I'm like, 'Did someone put you up to this that you called me right now. … I don't think you understand, these are bucket-list moments for a lot of us and I've now gotten to do it twice and it's just been an honor.' And he said, 'Any show I'm on, you're going to be in too.' It was really thoughtful that he did that and it just meant a lot to me."
Her connection with David has extended off screen too. At a poker night with her fiancé Tom Pelphrey a few years back, Cuoco says she ran into the comedy great after their time together filming Curb. While there — and while seven months pregnant with her now-3-year-old daughter — Cuoco was getting questions from those around her about her sonogram picture. So she pulled it out mid-game.
"We're passing my phone around to look at this sonogram and it gets to Larry and he's got his hand. He's really playing seriously and none of us are playing seriously. And he was like, 'Do we really have to look at these pictures while we're playing poker?' I go, 'Oh, I'm sorry, Larry. This is a beautiful sonogram photo. I'm sorry, are we bothering you?' He was like, 'I'm trying to play poker here. I'm trying. This is ridiculous. I don't want to see these,'" she recalls, laughing.
"I was laughing. It was hilarious. I thought for sure it was going to make it in the show," she says.
Sure, her poker-night run-in with David didn't make an appearance on TV, but Cuoco is glad she did in Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, which she thinks can teach viewers a "teeny, tiny bit" about U.S. history, all jokes aside.
"I actually think, in a weird way, you are going to learn something [from] this. You are going to learn little snippets of moments in time," she says. "Then, obviously, it's Larry's spin on it, which, if he was alive during that time, he's going to be the way he is."
The first two episodes of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness are available to stream on HBO Max. New episodes debut weekly on Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT ahead of the Aug. 7 finale.
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