Kaley Cuoco and Zosia Mamet Share How ‘The Flight Attendant’ Season 2 Hit Close to Home at FYC Event

Sure, the HBO Max series “The Flight Attendant,” about an alcoholic airline employee who ends up becoming a C.I.A. asset, is best known for its impressively out-there story beats, but for its cast, Season 2 hits a lot closer to home than one would think.

“I was going through so much this year, and so a lot of it was real,” said star Kaley Cuoco of her Season 2 performance as the titular flight attendant Cassie Bowden. Speaking to the audience of the comedy’s FYC event on Thursday night at the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center in Los Angeles, she joked that it’s even “almost a little silly” when she receives compliments on her ability to access those darker emotions for the show’s more dramatic scenes.

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Although she did not mention it explicitly during the panel, Cuoco was alluding to going through her divorce from equestrian Karl Cook as the show was filming throughout 2021 into winter 2022. The difficult new start mirrored her character’s arc in Season 2, with Cassie being newly sober. “Sometimes it was a little much,” she admitted, adding that she would leave set after a day of playing Cassie going through it, and come home “feeling a certain way.”

The experience of channeling what she was going through in real life into her performance was new for the Emmy-nominated actress. “I didn’t plan for that to happen, that’s for sure. It all just kind of happened at once, but it did, I guess, help. It was actually very therapeutic,” said Cuoco.

Giving more insight into her process, she said “usually I’m able to completely separate from work, like I’m not one that brings my work home, so this was a little different this time.” Cuoco, who also serves as an executive producer on the show, and was even the one to have optioned the novel Season 1 adapted, shared that she decided it was best to be transparent with the cast and crew about her present hardships during production. “Everyone was very aware of what I was going through. It wasn’t a secret. I didn’t want anything to be a secret because it wouldn’t look right. So I did get a lot of help and a major amount of support. So you see a lot of Cassie on the screen, but a lot of people helped put that together daily.”

Jennifer Rose Clasen/HBO Max

One of those people was co-star Zosia Mamet, who plays Cassie’s lawyer best friend Annie, and has become one of Cuoco’s closest confidants off-screen as well, even living with her while shooting Season 2 and “saving me from myself” as Cuoco put it. “We really did luck out so much to what Kaley was saying earlier about so much of her art in this season of our show imitating life, and being sort of an outlet for that,” said Mamet, who was also in attendance at the event, along with co-star Rosie Perez, “The Flight Attendant” showrunners Steve Yockey and Natalie Chaidez, executive producer Sarah Schechter, director/EP Silver Tree, and composer Blake Neely. “We genuinely do have this exceptional love for each other, and Kaley was going through such a hard time, and I was so happy to be able to be there for her in real life, through that.”

The episode that screened at the event, titled “Brothers & Sisters,” showcased the pair’s dynamic in a scene where Annie finds Cassie after she’s hit a major snag in her sobriety journey. “To me, that scene just felt so true to life, that at its core my friend was in pain. And when someone you love that deeply is in pain, they don’t need judgment. They don’t need commentary. They don’t need anything, not in that moment,” said Mamet.

“But in that moment, when someone truly hits rock bottom, all they need is your love, and they need you to be something that they can lean on, and a person who can hold them in that moment. And it felt so easy to do because I have so much love for this person,” added the actress, speaking for both her relationship with Cuoco, and their characters’ deep friendship.

“The Flight Attendant” Season 2 is now streaming on HBO Max.

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