There are a lot of stories out there about crazy or surprising things that actors do as a part of their personal process, but to be honest, what Simon Helberg used to do before portraying Howard Wolowitz on “The Big Bang Theory” is really unexpected.

According to “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” a 2022 book all about the making of Chuck Lorre’s massively popular CBS sitcom by Jessica Radloff, Helberg would utilize the mostly-fake stairway (which the characters use because the elevator in the main apartment building is just always broken) for his warm-up. I’ll just let Kaley Cuoco, who played Penny throughout the entire series, explain it.

“Before we would do our cast curtain call at the start of the Tuesday night taping, Simon had to run down the apartment staircase and scream like a crazy person,” Cuoco told Radloff. “We all had our thing. I had a camera and was always taking photos of everything, but Simon would run down the stairs and scream and then come back up. Every show night! And because the audience was already screaming from excitement, you couldn’t hear Simon screaming.”

Jim Parsons, who played Sheldon Cooper on the show, backed up Cuoco’s claim. “I don’t even think he’d go all the way down the stairs,” Parsons recalled. “He’d lean into the stairs, from that fourth-floor platform, and scream down. I guess we could call that tradition or superstition, or we could call it psychotic. I think that’s between Simon and his good doctors. I can’t speak to that.” After that quip, Parsons continued, “But in all seriousness, one of the things I think Simon and I connect so deeply about is a certain lifelong struggle with anxiety.”

To be fair, Helberg had to do a lot of wild stuff on “The Big Bang Theory,” so the screaming sort of makes sense. A little later in Radloff’s book, Helberg told the writer:

“I had to learn [several languages] for the show. I had to speak Klingon at some point as well. Chuck spoke a little Russian, so I remember him helping me with that. I had to speak Mandarian, which was the hardest, but I loved doing it. It’s very musical to learn a new language. But it was like they’d whell in a trunk, open it and say, ‘Let’s see what kind of tricks we can have Howard do … languages, magic, impressions, monkeys, animals?'”