Why Simon Helberg Never Wrote Lines For Howard On The Big Bang Theory

Sometimes, actors like to riff on set or contribute lines to their projects, but according to Simon Helberg, who played Howard Wolowitz on “The Big Bang Theory” for the entirety of its runhe didn’t typically craft any of his character’s jokes. Why? The writing team, according to Helberg, was a finely-tuned machine, and he simply didn’t think he should (or needed to) mess with its work.

While promoting his project “I Am I” — which Helberg produced and starred in alongside his wife Jocelyn Towne, who wrote and directed the independent film — Helberg spoke to Collider and revealed that he didn’t mess around with the scripts of “The Big Bang Theory” if he could help it. When asked if he felt “confident” to contribute lines, Helberg was very blunt.

“It’s not really about confidence,” the actor responded. “It’s just something that isn’t really in the vocabulary of what goes on at work. The writers write and the actors act. I’ve worked very differently before. There’s a lot of changing lines while we’re taping, and coming up with jokes, punching it up and rewriting scenes. My impulse is always to try to contribute, but very quickly, I felt that that wasn’t necessarily the way that this show worked.”

On its face, this might sound restrictive, but the way Helberg put it, it was simply a testament to how great the writers were. “In some ways, it’s a great harmony,” Helberg continued. “They are fantastic. It does take a little bit of courage to say, ‘Hey, how about this?’, but that’s just because they’re so great at what they do. It’s a pretty well-oiled machine. They provide us with such unbelievable words, and they’re so fast and they know the show so incredibly well, that there really aren’t many moments where I feel like I could add anything to what they bring to it.”

This Collider interview with Simon Helberg took place in 2014, right around the time that the seventh season of “The Big Bang Theory” drew to a close, and even in that interview, he expressed a desire to dig deeper into Howard because of the character’s immaturity. After saying he trusted the writers to handle Howard’s journey, Helberg continued, “I’d like to get to explore the deeper layers of my character. I think it makes it a lot more fun. It’s so atypical to have this many seasons to get to know a character and to play a character. The more they unravel of this guy, the more exciting it is for me, whether it’s the relationship with his father, or maybe getting to meet his father, and to see how his marriage survives that and survives the conversation about children, or any of the deeper things. He’s got a lot of growing up to do, so I like to watch him struggle and get through it all.”

In Jessica Radloff’s 2022 book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” Helberg was a little more … direct about his character’s growth. After eventual showrunner and executive producer Lee Aronsohn told Radloff that Howard’s behavior — specifically, the gross, creepy way he treated women — at the beginning of the series would “certainly be called harassment today,” Helberg chimed in, and to be honest, it didn’t seem like he was always so trusting of the writer’s room:

“People were very unhappy with some of the things that Howard would do or say, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I agree.’ I didn’t necessarily think that meant the character should be removed, but it was certainly more fun to play him as his heart got bigger and he shed his layer of sleaze.”

Elsewhere in Radloff’s book, Helberg discusses Howard’s character, writing, and growth, and for a second time, he doesn’t mince words, even saying that he found Howard hard to handle at times. “It was challenging to defend him in the way that I feel like actors have a job ultimately to defend the character that they’re playing,” Helberg admitted. “I used to have an acting teacher that would say, ‘You have to be your character’s lawyer,’ meaning you’re trying to find their point of view. Howard was a little tricky to make human. There definitely was a layer of sleaze that was oozing off of him, but I also felt like he certainly was the butt of the joke at the same time. I felt like it was actually making fun of him.”

“He was an offensive and inappropriate person, so I was personally pleased that he became more of a respectable human as the series progressed, and he became more three-dimensional,” Helberg then admitted — and he’s right. Thanks in large part to the introduction of Bernadette Rostenkowski (Melissa Rauch)a waitress turned microbiologist who meets Howard and falls for him in the show’s third season, Howard does eventually grow up, becoming a stand-up husband to Bernadette (the two wed at the end of the show’s fifth season) and father to two children, a daughter named Halley and a son named Michael.

You can experience Howard’s evolution as a character on “The Big Bang Theory,” which is streaming on Max now.