It all started with a big bang — and will go out with one, too. After 12 seasons, The Big Bang Theory will wrap on Thursday, May 16, and stars Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik will take their final bows.
“It’s been very emotional. It was a big lead up,” Bialik told Us Weekly exclusively ahead of the series finale. “It was a very prolonged emotional experience. It was very intense. Like, I was really anxious and you know, playing games on my phone a lot more than usual, just even when I was home, I had anxious energy!”
The Blossom alum also told Us she pretaped the final episode before the audience entered.
“We knew that we would have that, and the last scene that we pretaped was me and Jim. It’s a very emotional scene. It’s a really big scene, and it’s a really beautiful scene,” she said. “And I remember that hit me like, ‘If nothing else happens, we have completed the last episode.’”
Rauch, 38, also revealed to Us that saying goodbye to Bernadette will definitely be a struggle. “It’s just been nice that playing this character Bernadette has sort of always been a little bit ahead of me. She was pregnant before I was. She had kids before I did. It was sort of like a nice dress rehearsal,” the actress said. “It was like a nice older sister who was leading the charge for me, and I got to experience things in her shoes before I experienced them in my own. So hopefully, maybe at some point, she’s out there somewhere in the universe and will be experiencing things for me and I could catch up to her. But for now, it’ll be bittersweet, saying goodbye to Bernadette’s sensible loafers.”
See how the cast has changed over the past 12 years in our gallery below.