Kaley Cuoco says 'Dateline' helped her prepare for role in 'The Flight Attendant'
Cassie's partying gets her into some legal woes after she hooks up with one of her first-class passengers during a layover in Thailand only to find him dead in the same room as her the next morning.
Cuoco explained to etalk's Tyrone Edwards that her new project is based on a book of the same name by Chris Bohjalian about a girl named Cassie who "is the most fun girl in the world." Cassie is an international flight attendant, and she travels all over the world, meeting new people. "She drinks a lot, which starts out to be very cute, fun and funny that she's stealing small bottles off the plane until we find out later that she has a serious drinking problem alongside a lot of childhood trauma that needs to come up for her," Cuoco revealed.
On one of Cassie's layovers in Bangkok, Thailand, the flight attendant goes home with a passenger on the plane and has the night of her life. "They go party; they drink, they get completely blackout drunk and spend the whole night doing crazy stuff. She wakes up the next morning hungover AF and looks over, and he is dead and brutally murdered next to her," Cuoco explained. "Not only is she completely hungover, she has no idea how this happened." The Big Bang Theory star said from that moment on, a panicked Cassie makes every terrible decision possible before getting herself back to New York and denying anything ever happened in Bangkok.
"I watch a lot of Dateline, and I wouldn't have believed the stupid decision she makes to run unless I'd seen so many episodes of innocent people — the shock right — and they run, and you're yelling at the TV like, 'Just tell them you didn't do it. We know you didn't do it.' It seems so simple," she said. "But the fear and the shock overtakes your body. That's what happened to Cassie, and now she has to deal with the repercussions and trying to clear her name at the same time going down a very dark hole of emotion."
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The body that Cuoco's Cassie wakes up to (and had a great time with beforehand) is played by Michiel Huisman. The 34-year-old actress said that working with Huisman was amazing. "He is such a grounded person and a grounded actor and family man. He was lovely," she said. Cuoco said they were laughing together because she had never filmed a sex scene (apparently those sanitized TBBT ones don't count when you're in an HBO drama). "I said to him, 'Oh my God, Michiel, I am so nervous. I've never done a sex scene. Have you ever done one?' And he was like,' I was on Game of Thrones," Cuoco explained, adding that GOT gave the actor at least 10 sex scenes.
The nerves really got to Cuoco, which led her to ask Huisman for some advice for her first sex scene, and he told her to "stop being so weird." The 8 Simples Rules alum admitted that she was more afraid to take part in a sex scene on set because of the #MeToo times we're living in. "There are rules on how you shoot things and what you can touch and what you can see. At one point before we called action, I was supposed to climb on top of him, and I got on top, and I was on my toes with my hands in the air, Cuoco explained. She said the Game of Thrones actor asked her what she was doing, and she explained that she wasn't going to touch him until the director told her she could. When they called action, she tried to get into the scene, but Huisman said her actions were not looking right for the camera.
"He was laughing at me because I was so ridiculous about it. It did not come easy for me, let's put it that way," she said.
Watch The Flight Attendant on Crave. The Flight Attendant premieres Thursday, November 26 with a three episode release followed by two new episodes on December 3, two episodes on December 10, and the finale episode on December 17.
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