As Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina pop onto my screen to chat about what it was like to work on Based on a True Story, their brand-new Peacock true-crime dramedy, which premieres on June 8, they are doubled over with laughter. Though they’d never met prior to playing a long-term couple going through a little, let’s say, theoretical estrangement before murder brings them back together, if this interview is any indication, they instantly forged the kind of connection where finishing each other’s sentences came to them really easily.
“We never met. It was very instant. We also kind of … our sense of humor is very, very similar,” Cuoco begins.
“Which is really dumb,” Messina adds.
“Which is just dumb, dumb, dumb, which ruined everyone’s lives on set because we just wouldn’t stop,” Cuoco explains. “But it worked for these characters, and we were able to go off on these tangents and find a lot of little magic moments together that made it into the show.”
A simpatico vibe between the two seems completely feasible, considering both Cuoco (best recognized for her Emmy-nominated turn as drunk but well-meaning Cassie on The Flight Attendant and her 12 years as literal girl-next-door Penny on The Big Bang Theory) and the affable Messina (who has appeared in many, many films, such as Air, and put in five solid years as the handsomely toxic Danny Castellano on The Mindy Project) are the kind of leads who bring an infectious charm to the parts they play.
When you put the two together as husband and wife in Based on a True Story, you get Ava and Nathan, a couple facing imminent parenthood along with significant financial and existential crises. Their desperation drives them to bond as they attempt to do business with a serial killer in the form of a true-crime podcast, and all kinds of wild high jinks ensue — all of which is heightened by the aforementioned tangents. “At one point, one of our directors came up to me,” Cuoco begins. “We were doing a scene, and she was like, ‘Can you do this a little more straight?,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ In other words, it was getting so funny and outrageous, I kept getting told to bring it down. We were just being so insane.”
Cuoco first heard about the project as any highly successful, young, hot actor does — it came around. “I heard about the project way before I actually heard about the project, if that makes sense,” she explains. “I knew the script was looming around, but I had nothing to do with it. Then it came back around for me, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I heard about this; this is so brilliant.’ I love true crime. I love the tone they’re looking for, and I just thought it was such a funny, funny idea. The writing was brilliant. I obviously wanted to work with these amazing producers, you know, Bateman [as in Jason] and our amazing showrunner, Craig [Rosenberg].”
Part of the appeal of the project for both of them was that it was a chance to work with the other. “When you go into a job and you know you’re going to be truly one-on-one with someone for a long time, you kind of do your due diligence and kind of ask around town and other actor friends if they’ve worked with this person,” Cuoco says. “It was like, every single person I spoke to not only knew Chris but said he was the best human being in the world and that I had to work with him. He had a gleaming reputation. It was just so cool, so I was thrilled to do this with him.”
After joking that he first read the script when he “was a baby,” Messina agrees: “Very similar to her, I knew she was in it, and I was a huge fan of hers. She’s just so talented; I was dying to work with her. And then I read it, and I loved the idea of these two people that were falling apart, and in order to come back together, they go down the strangest, dumbest, darkest path. That was interesting to me. When you do these things, you never know. I did the same thing with Kaley: I asked around about her, as she said for me. And the same thing: glowing, glowing reviews. People just love her,” Messina pauses, “and they were wrong; they were absolutely wrong!” Messina laughs, then course corrects. “You never know what you’re going to get, really. Just friendship or a way of working, and from day one, we were just the best of friends.”
Cuoco’s character Ava is visibly pregnant throughout the series, and yes, it is her actual pregnancy. She discovered she was pregnant with daughter Matilda (born late March) early on in the process. “I was in town doing some chemistry reads, and I sat the producers down and was like, ‘What if this character was pregnant?’ And Craig was like, ‘Uh,’ and I was like, ‘No, really, you guys should really think about that,’ and I could see all their brains kind of going, ‘Wait, what?!’ They were very cute about it, very sweet, and they wrote it in, and it ended up being a great part of our show, actually. It kind of raised the stakes and the stress. I also love that it didn’t change anything about our scripts. Everything was the same; they were still doing these high-jinks moments, there were still those fantasies, there were still all these things, and it didn’t change the vibe at all, which I thought was really cool.”
Before ending our chat, I have to ask both Cuoco and Messina about the craziest thing they’ve done to pay the bills:
KALEY CUOCO: This, right here.
CHRIS MESSINA: This is it; you’re looking at it.
KC: This is as desperate as it gets.
CM: This is as downtrodden as it’s been.
KC: Downtrodden! [Laughs.] Were you in the middle of a bet to say that today?
CM: Yeah! I said I’m going to get downtrodden. I don’t know what it means.
KC: [Laughs.]
CM: Nothing like this, thank God! I don’t know.
KC: I don’t know.
I get the signal all entertainment journalists must abide by in interviews like this, to “please wrap” so the actors can move on to the next set of similar questions. I smile and wish them both well on their day, adding it might be interesting to see how a baby might fit in to Ava and Nathan’s edgy doings should there be a second season. They emphatically agree, politely wish me well back, and I leave the call, completely confident they’re still laughing.
Vivian Manning-Schaffel is a multifaceted storyteller whose work has been featured in The Cut, NBC News Better, Time Out New York, Medium, and The Week. Follow her on Twitter @soapboxdirty.
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