14 DAY TRIAL // Kaley Cuoco, now officially Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting after getting married to Ryan Sweeting on New Year’s Eve, was never much of a paparazzi or tabloid target even though she’s on one of the hottest sitcoms of the day, “The Big Bang Theory.” All that changed last summer.
From rarely making headlines, except at those times when she had a new project to promote and would make a red carpet / TV appearance, Kaley became for a hot minute the number 1 celebrity to keep an eye out for.
That’s because she started dating “Man of Steel” star Henry Cavill. They were an item for only 10 days but, during this time, not an hour went by without updates about the “hottest couple in town,” complete with photographic evidence provided by the paparazzi.
At that time, Kaley tells the latest issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, she found the frenzy around her hard to believe, describing the recognition that she suddenly got as “crazy.”
“I had no one following me until I met Superman. I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and my whole life, I could go anywhere, do anything. There had not been one paparazzi photo of me until like several months ago,” she says for the publication.
With the recognition also came the nasty comments about her and Kaley, unaccustomed to this “star treatment” admits to making the mistake of reading about herself online.
“I started reading [the social media comments] and thought, Maybe I need to make more of an effort and not go out in my UGGs and be disgusting. So I started putting on makeup. And they started writing, ‘Wow, someone really likes being in front of the camera’ and ‘Her hair’s done now for coffee.’ I couldn’t do anything right. Why am I reading this stuff? But I’m obsessed. I openly admit to being totally insane about that,” she says.
Perhaps one of the nastiest things that were said about her once she started going out with Cavill was that the romance wasn’t so much as a real romance but what has come to be known in the industry as a “fauxmance,” a fake relationship set up for PR purposes.
At the time, if you recall, Cavill was just coming out with “Man of Steel” and he really needed to be more present in the media for audiences in the US. Dating a girl-next-door-type of celebrity, with a solid fanbase because of her role on the aforementioned sitcom, was just the thing to get people to pay attention.
Kaley, in return, got extra attention for dating the hottest rising star so, in the end, it was a completely win-win situation for both.