Kaley Cuoco is fantastic, which is something I didn’t know until she completed 12 seasons of Big Bang Theory because I did not watch Big Bang Theory and Cuoco did little of note outside the series. In 2020, however, she illustrated what she’s capable of in HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, which seemed like the perfect vehicle for her: She could continue to display her comedic abilities but combine them with a madly addictive spy thriller.
Having found success there, though, it feels like Cuoco’s career has stalled again, as she continues to return to the same well with increasingly less success. The second season of Flight Attendant could not live up to the first; and her Groundhog Day-like romcom with Pete Davidson, Peacock’s Meet Cute, was as likable and forgettable as her Peacock series with Chris Messina, Based on a True Story, where she played a version of her Flight Attendant character. It was fine! Entertaining even, but it asked little of Cuoco’s talents. Somewhere along the way, she also had a small role as the love interest of Kevin Hart’s character in Man from Toronto, as though Kaley Cuoco did not realize that she was Kaley Cuoco.
Prime Video’s Role Play is, again, in a similar vein to most of Cuoco’s post Big Bang Theory work. It’s yet another variation on True Lies, only here Cuoco plays Emma, a contract killer whose husband of nearly a decade, Dave (David Oyelowo), has no idea that she doesn’t work as some vague corporate professional.
However, when Emma and Dave decide to spice up their love life by meeting each other in a hotel and pretending to be strangers, Dave gets ensnared in Emma’s career when a bounty is put on Emma’s head. The bounty is put out by the organization that trained her because Emma had the audacity to try and leave the profession.
It plays out predictably, although Cuoco and Oyelowo are so likable that viewers might otherwise forget how thoroughly mediocre Role Play is until it’s over. Neither Bill Nighy nor Connie Nielsen can give the movie much life, either, as it ticks off all the True Lies tropes until it sputters toward its ending point.
As watchable as it is, Role Play is not a good movie, and it’s hard not to wonder how Cuoco ended up here. It’s as though she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as her Big Bang Theory character but has, instead, been pigeonholed by her The Flight Attendant character. Cuoco should be having a career like Reese Witherspoon or even Anna Kendrick, but she keeps ending up in the same roles on similar projects, all on streaming, where accountability goes to die. She’s better than this and her agent needs to find a dark but compelling indie project to break her out of this funk.
