Simon Helberg, who played Howard Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory from 2007 to 2019, says he spent the show’s early years “paralyzed with fear and anxiety,” pushed by success and pressure—until he built rituals and found ways to cope.
Simon Helberg remembers what it felt like to step into the machine of The Big Bang Theory at the height of its run—and how, for years, his mind wouldn’t let him settle.
On “Dinner’s On Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson,” the actor—best known for portraying Howard Wolowitz—said he was “pretty paralyzed with fear and anxiety for like the first eight or nine years.”
Ferguson asked whether it came from “the weight of the job” and “losing anonymity,” and Helberg answered, “Yeah, I think everything was contributing to it, but I just, I ran very hot, just very nervous, very, very anxiety-ridden.”
He described how the show’s success didn’t simply bring comfort—it piled on pressure and expectations that didn’t match reality. As he put it. “With the success came just the pressure. and also then. the expectation that it would be just. sort of. like a walk in the park. Like all my dreams should be coming true. And it just felt so scary to me all the time.”.
That constant strain left him overwhelmed by fear and with the unsettling sense that he was on the verge of breaking. Helberg said he felt “falling apart,” tying that feeling to the mounting pressure that followed the hit series.
In the middle of that struggle, he reached a particularly hard point—one he doesn’t try to dress up. “There was a [certain] low point of just kind of seizing up. I had a couple therapists and I was trying medication and it was not great. It just wasn’t a good experience,” he said.
The anxiety didn’t disappear all at once. Over time, Helberg found a method that worked for him even when everything else felt shaky. In The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive. Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series. a 2022 book by Jessica Radloff. it’s described that Helberg used the stairway on the show’s set to calm himself down.
Kaley Cuoco, who played Penny, recalled what that looked like. She told Radloff. “Before we would do our cast curtain call at the start of the Tuesday night taping. Simon had to run down the apartment staircase and scream like a crazy person… And because the audience was already screaming from excitement. you couldn’t hear Simon screaming.”.
Cuoco also gave a sense of how Helberg viewed the habit. Helberg once thought the pre-show ritual was embarrassing, but he kept it through his career. Jim Parsons—who played Sheldon Cooper—added his own blunt take on it when he told Radloff. “I guess we could call that tradition or superstition. or we could call it psychotic. I think that’s between Simon and his good doctors.”.
Helberg later spoke directly to Radloff about that embarrassment, explaining that he didn’t abandon the ritual even after doubts. “I did it every single tape night and also before most pre-shoots as well. I still do. I was always kind of embarrassed about it, but then eventually I was like, ‘No, it’s not that crazy.’”.
The storyline, at least from Helberg’s side, is clear: the show that made his dreams come true also turned him into someone who spent years bracing for collapse—until he built a routine that helped him make it through the tape night, again and again.
Simon Helberg Howard Wolowitz The Big Bang Theory Dinner’s On Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson anxiety fear Jim Parsons Kaley Cuoco Jessica Radloff 2022 book podcast