Simon Helberg

Howard Wolowitz was supposed to be the punchline. A mama's boy aerospace engineer who hit on women relentlessly while living in his mother's house, Wolowitz was the broadest joke in a show full of socially misfiring men. Helberg made it stick by playing the character's obliviousness completely straight, and spent twelve seasons doing it. His training as a classical pianist turned out to be an actual asset when he played accompanist Cosme McMoon in Florence Foster Jenkins in 2016 opposite Meryl Streep and earned a Golden Globe nomination. Howard Wolowitz was a better career move than it looked.

The Big Bang Theory made him wealthy by any measure. Forbes ranked him third among the world's highest-paid TV actors in 2018 at $23.5 million. Since the show ended in 2019, he's picked interesting work: a Rian Johnson mystery series, Night Court's third season, and a lead role in AMC's The Audacity as a billionaire AI founder, premiering in 2026. He's not chasing blockbusters. Whether the post-TBBT career builds into something or stays comfortably eclectic is the question his choices keep deferring.

He became a French citizen to get a role in Leos Carax's Annette, which opened the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. The director reportedly wanted enough Europeans in the cast to secure EU funding, and Helberg went through the actual naturalization process despite not speaking French. His wife Jocelyn Towne, a filmmaker and niece of screenwriter Robert Towne, was already a French citizen. The episode captures something about how he operates: he commits to the bit further than most people would bother.