Mayim Bialik has a long history in the entertainment industry. She's been acting since
she was a preteen, but her journey to stardom wasn't as straightforward as you might think.
So how did she get where she is today? Keep watching to see her stunning transformation!
Bialik was born on December 12th, 1975 in California to Jewish parents who were part
of a Reform congregation. Reform is a less strict form of Judaism compared to the much
more rigid Orthodox branch. Growing up, Bialik was heavily influenced by her family's heritage.
Three of her grandparents were immigrants, and her mother was raised Orthodox,
though she left Orthodoxy when she was a teenager. Her parents always taught her the importance of
hard work in the form of chores and homework, even when she started acting at a young age.
Bialik's fascination with her Jewish heritage endured into adulthood. In college, she minored
in Hebrew and Judaic studies. She also studied Yiddish and has visited Israel multiple times.
It's clear that her upbringing in Reform Judaism has given her a lifelong passion and faith.
Bialik's passion for acting started when she participated in school plays as a child.
As she recalled in an interview with Edge Magazine, it made her think,
"Oh, I should be an actress — kids do commercials and stuff like that."
Unfortunately, Bialik didn't have as much luck getting into
commercials as other child stars of her generation did. As she explained,
"In 1986, when I stated there was a notion that people on television
needed to look what they called 'All-American'. I’ve always had prominent features and I’ve
always looked ethnic, so I ended up doing a lot of character roles."
For her first big-screen acting job, Bialik played a character
with five lines in the 1988 horror movie Pumpkinhead. It was a pretty small part,
but it wouldn't be long before she would become the star of the show.
Bialik's first big breakout role arrived in 1990 when she was cast as the lead character
on the NBC sitcom Blossom. It was the role that she'd been waiting for.
As she explained in a 2016 interview with Yahoo!,
"I read the Blossom script and it was the first script I had ever read where I laughed out loud.
You could tell in that first script,
a very unusual sense of humor and it really suited my sense of humor."
Bialik's time on Blossom was hugely important and loads of fun.
She and her co-star Jenna von Oÿ had a blast on set together, and they even learned to tap
dance during their lunch breaks. The entire cast became like a real family, and the experience was
as good as it possibly could be for the teenage Bialik. She told Edge Magazine,
"I was also really lucky that on the Blossom set I was 14 to 19 years old, and I never saw
anyone drinking or doing drugs. They had a very clean set, and I think that’s really important."
Bialik has always thrived when she's played quirky roles, and as it turns out,
she was pretty unusual herself while growing up. As she told Marie Claire in 2017,
"I knew there was something — many things; possibly every thing about me
that was different from other girls. And other boys, a lot of the time."
Bialik has plenty of examples to cite that illustrate her uniqueness. For instance,
at 5 years old, she dressed in lederhosen with Princess Leia braids in her hair.
At 10, she cried on her birthday at the thought of getting older. By 16 she was reading existential
philosophy and dressing like a goth, and by age 17, she found herself interested in sports cars,
Elvis Costello, comic books, and veganism. Unfortunately, all of these things made her
feel lonely and odd. But as an adult she's now learned to accept her differences. She even
wrote an entire book called Girling Up about her experience of being different as a child.
"I basically wrote a book from my personal experience as kind of a late
bloomer and my experience as a scientist to explore all aspects of being female."
After finishing high school, Bialik enrolled in college at UCLA,
opting not to further pursue her acting career at the time. While in a calculus class she
met Michael Stone, her future husband. He was wearing an Elvis Costello T-shirt at the time,
which sparked the initial attraction. For Bialik, who once said that she wanted to find
someone who looks and thinks like the English musician, Stone seemed to be a perfect fit.
The two of them eventually married in 2003. Stone, who was raised a Mormon,
converted to Judaism. The couple would go on to have two sons together in 2005 and 2008,
but in 2012, they announced that they were splitting up.
Despite their divorce, Bialik and Stone have remained amicable. In 2018, she told Us Weekly,
"I spend a lot of time building my ex up for my boys."
After completing her undergraduate degree, Bialik went on to get a doctorate in neuroscience,
which she completed in 2007. As she explained in a 2015 interview with The Guardian,
"I really loved teaching and research. I didn’t have the grades to go to medical
school and in retrospect I think I would have been unhappy in the structure of medical school."
Bialik likely would have stayed in academia if she never had kids,
but once she had her boys, she decided to take a different path. As she told The Guardian,
"Being a research professor seemed like what I wanted to do.
But once I had my first child I realized how much time I wanted to be with him."
To that end, Bialik started homeschooling her children.
She also taught neuroscience to other homeschooled children for five years.
And while she eventually returned to acting, she remains passionate about science,
and she uses her platform to encourage young people to pursue careers in STEM fields.
When it came to raising their children, Bialik and Michael Stone made some unusual choices.
In particular, they decided to follow a practice called "Attachment Parenting."
The term is used to describe parents who co-sleep with their children,
let the children determine feeding time, have extensive physical contact, and are especially
responsive to crying. Bialik even wrote a book about her experience called Beyond the Sling.
She explained in a 2012 interview with Time that she was inspired to try attachment parenting
after seeing some friends use the method successfully. She also responded to a
common criticism of the practice by noting,
"My kids don’t run my house. Attachment parenting is not a passive parenting style.
The subtle difference is that you are very committed to being near your child
and you’re also committing yourself to not encourage early independence
but to embrace the natural progression of independence."
"People who are attachment parents, it's not like it's an all-or-nothing business. There are
people who have had C-sections who are attachment parents and people
who don't breastfeed or don't want to breastfeed. It's not an all-or-nothing."
Whatever others may think of attachment parenting,
we're glad that Bialik has found a method that works for her!
After finishing her doctorate and becoming a parent, Bialik decided
that it was time to return to acting. But it wasn't because she pined for the
lights of Hollywood. As she revealed on an episode of Popcorn with Peter Travers,
"The true story is I was running out of health insurance."
At the time, she and her husband were struggling a bit, and she thought a few parts here and there
would tide her over. She wasn't expecting it to become a full-time adjustment. But as fate would
have it, a certain show called The Big Bang Theory was looking for someone to play a neuroscientist,
so Bialik decided to go for it. As she revealed to The Hollywood Reporter,
"I auditioned with five other actresses — none of whom were neuroscientists — who
were really talented and many of whom I knew of. There wasn't a lot of lines;
it was five lines in that season three finale. They told us all to wait after
we went in. They called two of us back in. We went home and found out that afternoon."
"When I auditioned for the part, I uh, on my resume, under miscellaneous,
it says 'PhD Neuroscience,' cause I didn't know where else to put it on an acting resume."
What started as a small role eventually became an integral part of the show, as Bialik was
upgraded to a series regular in Season 4. She ultimately appeared in over 200 episodes and
became an essential member of the ensemble. She also racked up four Emmy nominations four years
in a row in the process. In 2012, she showed up to the Emmy ceremony wearing a bedazzled cast,
as she had suffered a hand injury during a car accident a month earlier. Despite that, she was
able to maintain her sense of humor and head straight back to work. As she told Vanity Fair,
"It’s a testament to how much I love my job, because I went right back to work [...] I
wanted to be with my buddies. Everybody cares for me—we care for each other."
Bialik has been interested in veganism since she was very young. She first started exploring
going without meat and dairy when she was a teenager. She went vegetarian at the age of 19,
and then later gave up all animal products after reading the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran
Foer [FOR]. She even published her own book of vegan recipes called Mayim's Vegan Table.
In 2016, Bialik opened up about why veganism is so important to her in a video on her
Youtube channel. She noted that veganism wasn't a viable option for her growing up,
as attitudes at the time were different than they are now. She also explained that the idea of not
knowing where food comes from is actually a really dangerous aspect of the modern food industry,
which is why she feels safer avoiding meat products altogether.
"If I had told my mom that I felt weird about eating animals, she would've been like,
'What? People didn't survive the Holocaust so you could complain about what I put in front of you.'"
We have to say that Bialik's commitment to living ethically and healthily is impressive,
and we're glad that she's made the decision that's right for her.
Ever since she was a child, Bialik has struggled with her mental health.
The mixture of feeling different from her peers, becoming a child star, and her family's history
of mental health issues have all contributed to her suffering from depression from a young age.
Fortunately, after years of therapy, she eventually learned more about mental health
through her doctoral studies. This gave her a new insight into her own history with depression.
She spoke about her journey in a 2018 video for the Child Mind Institute. As she put it,
"There are answers, and for me,
some of those answers, I had to wait years to find, and I needed to get different help."
It took a long time for Bialik to find the right help for herself
after she tried various kinds of therapy and medication. But eventually she found a solution.
"I wish I could've told my younger self, 'Something will work.' It's just gonna
take sometimes more research, sometimes more referrals."
We think it's so amazing that Bialik has spoken up about mental health by
sharing her own difficult experience! This can be a hard topic to discuss,
so it's important to have people being open about it publicly.
In 2020, Mayim Bialik found herself stuck at home like so many others
during the COVID-19 pandemic. But in a surprising turn of events,
she was able to use the extra free time to advocate for an unusual cause: cats! She and her
Big Bang Theory co-star Jim Parsons joined forces to create a new comedy series called Call Me Kat,
about a woman who opens up a cat cafe. The show is based on the British sitcom Miranda.
And Bialik's interest in cats doesn't end with making shows about them.
In fact, she has three cats herself. To that end,
she linked up with the company Royal Canin for its "Take Your Cat to the Vet" initiative
to promote education among cat owners. The program is designed to encourage people to take proper
care of their felines so that they can live their best lives. In an interview with Fox News, Bialik
admitted that she was a little worried about the stigma that can come with being a cat person,
but considering how well her life's been going, we think she'll be just fine.
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