Sometimes, accidents in real life prevent actors from appearing in projects - for example, on "The Big Bang Theory". Kaley Cuoco missed two episodes as Penny due to a real (and very serious) injury sustained while riding horses. According to Jessica Radloff's book The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series, which hits shelves in 2022, Cuoco and her co-star Johnny Galecki, who once again plays Penny's love interest. Leonard Hofstadter planned a prank on the show where they staged a fake hit. Unfortunately for literally everyonewent horribly wrong.

The prank in question takes place in the Season 6 episode "The Tangible Affection Proof", where a seriously pissed off Penny is at Valentine's Day dinner with Leonard and their friends Bernadette Rostenkowski (Melissa Rauch) and Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg). "We were doing this scene where Leonard and Penny are arguing at the table, and first we told AD Anthony Rich that we had a joke and we were going to do it," Cuoco recalled to Radloff. "This wouldn't be funny today, but it was really funny at the time - or so we thought - when our argument would get really heated and Johnny would punch me and I'd fall off camera. The chair, so we do that and it gets really big, and Johnny comes at me, and…”

"And she landed under the table," Galecki continued. “And then I started pretending to step on her face.

Rauch added that Cuco "came out of the table with blood on her head, for a second I thought it was fake blood." The blood was, as it turns out, it is not fake at all.

As Kaley Cuoco told Jessica Radloff, at first no one noticed anything was wrong at all — they even laughed at the well-executed joke — until she came off the table bleeding. enough strongly.

Director Mark Cendrowski correctly pointed out that cuts on a person's head or face can bleed enoughso at the moment it looked very, very bad - and to make matters worse, the production couldn't even fix the problem. "All the cuts on the head bleed much worse, but she was cut just below the eyebrow," Tsendrovski recalled. “It immediately started to swell, so we got pressure and ice on it; the makeup team even tried to cover it up, but it kept bleeding. We were just trying to joke around, but boy, we took it too far."

Okay, so this all sounds pretty bad - and from there, it did worse! Kaley Cuoco told Jessica Radloff that not only was she bleeding profusely, but the flow was showing no signs of slowing down. "It wouldn't stop bleeding!" Cuoco reminded. "At 19:00 I had to go to a plastic surgeon so that he could be stitched up. I mean, we thought it was so funny, but no one else did, so we pulled the bangs down to cover the seams so you couldn't see what happened, and the whole thing was a total nightmare.

The fact that the crew put up signs saying no more pranks or "rough house" is, admittedly, pretty funny - although it's a lot more serious than some of the show's other "rules". including that men were not supposed to grow beards during filming — but according to Marc Cendrowski, making the episode after Cuoco's injury was a total pain ... because the actress' battle scars were so clearly visible. Not only that, but Cendrowski said the episode was ultimately demanding special effects. "Yeah, I tried to avoid shooting her straight when we could shoot again the next day because you could see the swelling," Cendrowski revealed, adding that any swelling was fixed in post-production.

The Big Bang Theory is streaming on Max now, so check out The Tangible Affection Proof and see if you can spot some weird angles thanks to Cuoco's injury.