Kaley Cuoco

She spent years as the dependable sitcom actress: 8 Simple Rules, a stint on Charmed, nothing that made noise. The role that landed wasn't written for her. She auditioned for a character called Katie in the Big Bang Theory pilot and got turned down for being too young. Producers rewrote the part as the warmer Penny and brought her back. That second shot ran 12 seasons, peaked near 20 million viewers a week, and paid her $1 million per episode by season 8. By the 2019 finale, she'd earned $150 million in base salary alone.

The Flight Attendant became HBO Max's biggest debut original when it launched in 2020. Cuoco produced and starred in it through Yes, Norman Productions, which she'd founded in 2017 while BBT still had two seasons left. The pivot from dependable sitcom actress to streaming producer worked. She followed with Vanished for MGM+, a comedy series for HBO, and a drama pilot at HBO Max with Ray Romano, and she doesn't look like someone who misses Penny much.

In BBT's later seasons, she and the show's other leads took a $100,000 per episode pay cut to raise Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch's salaries to $500,000 per episode. That move gets buried under the two divorces. She's been candid about the second, calling it 'a super dark time' she only survived by throwing herself into work. She has a daughter with Tom Pelphrey, got engaged to him in 2024, and the production company is the most stable relationship she's got going.