Van Wilder, Old School
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$45 Million
“The Big Bang Theory” was a series that ran for more than a decade on CBS, dominating the ratings and bringing in a lot of awards. The show also made the actors incredibly wealthy, even if they hadn’t been all that well known before. Simon Helberg was part of the main cast that appeared in the show’s entirety, and it was his first time helping to lead a television show, so that didn’t go bad at all for a first try.
Helberg comes from a family in the entertainment business, as his father came from Germany and became an actor, while his mother worked in casting departments. “My dad was one of the original members of the Groundlings (improv troupe), and I watched him as an actor have ups and downs, and I watched my mom as a casting director have ups and downs,” he said. Helberg himself was born (obviously) in Los Angeles on December 9, 1980. Helberg spent his entire childhood in the Los Angeles area, and had aspirations of becoming an actor himself.
“My whole life revolved around TV as a kid,” Helberg said. “I would come home and make sure I finished my homework every night by 8 o’clock, generally so that I could sit down and watch TV from 8 to 10. As a kid, it was ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Roseanne’ and ‘Growing Pains’ and ‘Perfect Strangers’ and ‘Golden Girls’. I mean, I watched everything.”
After high school, Helberg went to New York University and trained in theater, at the same time starting a comedy website that caught on with young audiences. Helberg got his first taste of big screen acting in 1999 when he appeared in the Lawrence Kasdan film “Mumford”. Two years later, Helberg had his first television appearances, having guest roles in multiple shows including “Undeclared” and “Son of the Beach”. In 2002, Helberg briefly joined the cast of the sketch series “MADtv” and added more guest spots in the first half of the decade on shows like “Reno 911” and “Arrested Development”.
During this same time, Helberg was also padding his film resume. He was in the films “A Cinderella Story”, “Good Night and Good Luck” and “For Your Consideration”. Then, 2007 proved to be a huge breakout year for Helberg. That was when he joined the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” to play Howard Wolowitz, a bright engineer that befriends the three other main characters.
It’s a role that he almost didn’t take on, either. “I said, ‘I don’t want to play nerds anymore...so I’ll pass on the nerd show,’” Helberg said. “But I just got convinced to go in and I think I made a good choice.”
Helberg played the role to much acclaim throughout the show’s run that lasted for 12 seasons and nearly 300 episodes. In the same year that the show started, Helberg also had considerable roles in the films “Evan Almighty”, “Walk Hard” and “Mama’s Boy”. While “The Big Bang Theory” was still on the air, Helberg continued to make guest spots on various shows, though most of them came as a voice actor in roles like “The Tom and Jerry Show” and “Kung Fu Panda”.
Toward the end of the series, Helberg also started to get some more prominent film work. He had roles in the films “A Serious Man”, “We’ll Never Have Paris” (which he directed) and “Florence Foster Jenkins”, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He was also able to display his piano skills, apparently becoming an accomplished pianist at a young age.
Helberg says that there’s a relation between acting and music. “It would be interesting to do a survey,” he said. “I certainly think obviously rhythm is a huge part of being an actor. It just is unconscious to a degree but particularly in comedy rhythm is pretty essential and there’s probably something more physiological going on. I have a good ear for music and voices and dialects and I’m sure that in some way it plays into everything that I do but I’m sure there’s a couple of tone-deaf, rhythm-free great actors out there.”
That big 2007 that he had didn’t just come from his career success, either. Helberg also tied the knot that year, marrying actress Jocelyn Towne who has been in shows such as “Havoc” and “Gilmore Girls”. Since then, the couple has two children with a son and a daughter. Talking about that career path he’s followed, Helberg says that “I think in terms of a career trajectory, it’s good for people to be reminded that, in spite of seeing me a million times a day on a show for 10 years playing the same character, I’m and actor, and actors like to play different people.”
Helberg thinks that there’s still a lot of room to grow with his acting abilities. He doesn’t give himself too much credit at times. “I have sort of a simultaneous arrogance and complete lack of self-esteem,” he admitted. “It just depends on what the temperature outside is, I guess.”
“Because it’s a very precarious thing,” he continued. “That’s what I realized. To tie it into the movie, success and failure and talent and whatever, they’re kind of like hanging by a threat. It’s also very nebulous, because you feel like it can go wrong very easily, and it’s not always anything that you can tie back to any sort of reason. Sometimes it just doesn’t feel right, or it doesn’t happen. And when there’s a magical moment, it’s just sort of magical.”
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