Melissa Rauch made a perfect impression of this invisible character in Big Bang theory

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At one point during his race on “The Big Bang Theory”, Melissa Rauch, who plays Bernadette Rostenkowski -Wolowski – a ferocious waitress the size of a pint that ends up courting and marrying Simon Helberg to Howard Wolowitz on the series – surprised her colleagues with a spot -on impersonation. More specifically, Rauch could make a Perfect Printing of Carol Ann Susi, the actress who rarely played it but often heard Ms. Wolowitz, the commanded and dominating mother of Howard (with whom Howard lives until he moves with Bernadette).

“I never came from the voice on the set, so they would not have known it,” said Rauch in Jessica Radloff’s book in 2022 “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series”, where she and other members of the team and the crew opened the same voice on Susi, and how the Bernadette Finished using the voice of the voice to say to Howard in the moments of the extreme. “I would have been afraid to insult him. But honestly, I didn’t know I could do it until I tried it when I saw it in the script.” Rauch’s husband, Winston, had heard her practicing it in their cuisine and ran frantically thinking that she was injured because he could hear her screaming in his voice. “And since we shared a fairly thin wall with our neighbors in the apartment in which we live, I realized that I had to practice all the lines Ms. Wolowitz alone in my car, so I did not have anyone in the future!”

“Melissa was incredible! It reminds her her mother, which is weird and funny and understandable,” recalls the writer and executive producer Steve Molaro. “Howard will mainly marry his mother.”

Rauch proposed his own incredibly specific voice for Bernadette, and all of this helped the character to transform throughout the show. “Over time, we have made Bernadette a little harmful,” Co-creator Chuck Lorre told Radloff. “She was a buzzed corporate character. You didn’t play her with her.” Lorre noted that his voice was “a wonderful instrument”, describing sound as “a piccolo on acid”. He continued:

And then it is tiny. So these two things juxtaposed to this woman killer of bullets in the wall which does not even think twice to cut moral corners to get things done … It was happy to look. The character became much more than what was originally created. “”

Part of this transformation is, frankly, the fact that Bernadette begins (unconsciously, in the story) imitating Susi’s voice as Ms. Wolowitz … So Molero is right in the fact that Howard fundamentally marries his mother.

There is no doubt that Carol Ann Susi’s distinctive voice left a huge impression on the creative team and viewers of “The Big Bang Theory”. As Steve Molero said, “there was one point, early enough, where Carol Ann had such a distinct voice, and it was so fun to imagine who this woman was. It could never be up to what could have been in your head.” In this case, Melissa Rauch and Simon Helberg also loved her in real life (which is why the first was a little afraid of imitating his voice on the set).

“She was like this person with the size of a bite, and you could see the top of her head sometimes on the furniture as she was fighting to put herself behind the scenes,” recalls Helberg (who is another fun connection between Ms. Wolowitz and Bernadette when you consider that Chuck Lorre described Rauch as “tiny”). As Lorre said, they were sitting Susi on a chair behind a wall or elsewhere off screen, and there were times when the team would have lunch and said: “Where was Carol Ann? Was anyone broken?” And realize that she was still sitting at her post, waiting to be excused for lunch. “What she did was actually very complicated. The nuance she could bring, even with her level of decibels always on the ground of a screaming eagle who launched heaven, and her execution and timing were so perfect,” said Lorre. “It’s a real challenge to do it without being able to see anyone.”

“She looked like so many people in my family, because of her authentic atmosphere of the East Coast,” said Rauch, remembering his off-screen co-star emotion. “One of the first things she told me was something the kind of ‘then! You are the new woman in my son’s life!’ She was so hilarious.

Not only Melissa Rauch had a perfect impression of Carol Ann Susi in her rear pocket, but the two also spent a lot of time together when they did not turn … because Rauch said to Jessica Radloff, she often gave Susi a return home when they finished for the day. “She never obtained a driving license, so she took the bus to Warner Bros. with all her bags. But she loved it,” recalls Rauch. “She said:” I’m not going to drive in this city with all the madmen! “If we finish working at the same time, I would bring it home and we would have all these very good conversations.”

Unfortunately, Susi died in 2014 – which means that, on “The Big Bang Theory”, Ms. Wolowitz also died at that time – and the distribution was left to cry at the same time on and off screen. “I had never seen a celebration of someone’s life like their memorial,” Rauch told Radloff. “For the one on the set, we all gathered on stage and told our favorite Carol Ann stories through our tears. And Johnny and Molero put the little photo of her in the refrigerator in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment, which remained until the very end of the series.”

“We wanted her to be in each episode from that moment, so we knew that Sheldon and Leonard’s refrigerator was the best place to do so,” said Steve Molaro about this sweet gesture. As Simon Helberg said, it was the ideal way to quietly honor Susi … because the public would not recognize his face. “I looked at him often, and it was good to have a little piece of her there,” he said. “It was also a little funny because no one knew what she looked like, and so you could get out of it by putting this photo up there. It was like a secret sign that we had in a group.”

You can watch the impression of Rauch de Susi – and hear the dulcet tones of Susi yourself – on “The Big Bang Theory”, which is in trouble on HBO Max.