Simon Helberg Bonds With Meryl Streep in 'Florence Foster Jenkins'

"I just think he fell from heaven," says Meryl Streep about her co-star Simon Helberg in her new film "Florence Foster Jenkins" (due out August 12).

Why such praise for an actor she had never met prior to making the film? One reason is the unusually close relationship the pair had during filming in London last year. Not only do they play an odd, real-life couple: Streep as the self-styled operatic diva, socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, Helberg as her accompanist, the deliciously named Cosme McMoon; but they perform most of the concert performances seen in the film in real-time: Helberg provides the piano accompaniment to some of the most difficult arias in the coloratura repertory while Streep performs them in the Florence Foster Jenkins' distinctive style. Those who don't know how she sang, let's just say there's a compelling reason she's been a cult figure for the past 70 years.

"I knew I was going to work closely with her," Helberg recalls, "but I thought it could be a thing that I would see her when I see her on the set and then not talk to her... But it was the opposite of that. I mean she welcomed me, we got close, we spent a lot of time together, we talked a lot; we rehearsed a tremendous amount off the set and in rooms on the set and in her apartment. There is nothing she wants to do more than make sure the movie is great. Not her, not her performance in the movie, but that the movie is as good as it can be and that the story is clear."

Piano playing a must

You might think that the 35-year-old Helberg came to the film because of his on-going role on the mega-hit CBS sit-com "The Big Bang Theory" where he plays the nerdie Aerospace Engineer Howard Wolowitz, best-known for this turtlenecks and '60s bowl-styled haircut. That turned out to have nothing to do with it. Stephen Frears, the film's director, first learned of Helberg when his casting director, Kathleen Chopin, said she had the perfect actor for the role. "He just wanted to know if I could play the piano. I don't think he knew 'The Big Bang Theory.' I don't think he had seen my work," Helberg explains.

As he prepared for the role, Helberg crammed learning the classical repertoire, including Mozart's Queen of the Night aria from "The Magic Flute," which became Jenkins' signature piece, all the while wrestling with a nagging question of whether he and Streep would click while filming. "It was unknown what Meryl and I were able to do and if we would ever be able to do it live just for technical reasons. It was a big unknown. There is nothing she can't do, so I had to live up to that. Stephen going into this, I don't think it was known that she and I could do this for real, but somehow we did."

Who was Cosme?

Helberg admits knowing nothing about Jenkins and McMoon when the script was first given him. "I didn't know anything about them," he says, "but I was familiar with the concept the deluded person who believes they have a gift. It's the lack of their ability that is being celebrated. That is something familiar to me. But I had definitely not heard that voice and I was so happy it existed, that it was real. After I finished the script I waited to listen because I wanted to imagine it. I love this story. I find it to be inspiring and fascinating and tragic in certain ways, but very human. Then I found out that David Bowie put her on his list of top ten albums of all time. It was almost like performance art, except she was fully unaware of what she sounded like, that it was not an act."

When he began to research McMoon, he found very little about him on the web. "There was a very short blurb on Wikipedia," he remembers. "But a lot of it was unknown." What is known about McMoon is that he was born in Mexico in 1901, moved to Texas when he was ten and was considered a prodigy on the piano. At the age of 20 he moved to New York and gave his first recital there in 1922. For that concert he was praised by the New York Times for "the agility of his fingers and the clarity of his technique." About that time he met Jenkins and over time became her accompanist for the next 20 years. "He did not think she had a great talent," writes Jenkins biographer Darryl W. Bullock. "Believing that she could not hear her own voice properly, but he admired her spirit and her passion for music, and he was happy to play for her."

Inventing his character

Helberg also interviewed a number of accompanists to better understand the psychological makeup of someone who would choose to collaborate with another artist in such a secondary role. "It's a very interesting thing to be that. It is telling of your personality to be an accompanist. It is this selfless endeavor. Are these people that wanted to be professional classical pianists and ended up in the shadow of these singers? And what is that relationship, that give and take? And what does it mean?

"And watching these pianists and hearing about their type of personality inspired me," he continues, "and also just being imaginative. It was fun and it frees you up when there are not books upon books about this person, so I got to invent him with Nick Martin (who wrote the script) and through the music and hearing about how much Cosme did sacrifice for her. He was a really great piano player and he had to throw his career up in the air (to work with Jenkins) and hopefully come out looking decent. You hear him show off in the four-bar breaks or whatever that she wouldn't sing. That was like his moment. But then he would wait, if she skipped a bar, he'd compensate, he'd change keys to try to make her sound better. I see their dynamic here. And some of it was just looking for inspiration. That was in the script."

What Helberg does extremely well in the film is capture McMoon's conflicting emotions when hearing the hapless Jenkins sing. In short, his expressions of surprise at what comes out of Streep's mouth are priceless. They also act as a mirror that reflects the film's audience's response, many of whom know nothing about Jenkins' performing style. "When you first hear her sing, there was a descriptive paragraph that said basically what we see on Cosme's face. She starts singing and it said something like he looks like a 'stunned mullet.' First I had to look up 'stunned mullet.' (The term is defined in the Urban Dictionary as 'in complete bewilderment or astonishment.') But I knew what Nick, the writer, was intending. It was clear to me that Cosme was hearing her for the first time and the audience was hearing her for the first time and the audience is seen through my character."

Helperg admits to being apprehensive at working with Streep for the first time. "I hoped to just get out of it alive. I was very nervous. I didn't think she was going to be mean or tough because I don't generally think you can be a real asshole and then at the same time do that kind of work. I mean you can, I'm sure; but there is a humanity she brings to her roles. And you see her at all the award shows and I just didn't feel that she was going to be anything but kind."

Meryl surpassed his expectations

What he learned surpassed his expectations. "Working with Meryl makes it easy to be alive in those scenes because she is so present and so in the moment and it is different every time, so it is surprising when you are working with her. Not like wildly -- she's not being different to be different in every take -- but she's present. She's obviously an incredibly talented actress, so she's the best at really being alive and that brings the best out in other people."

He also had high praise for her ability to mimic Jenkins' vocal style. "To sing basically the most challenging pieces of coloratura in the canon of music in multiple languages which she did and was able to do well, because you have to be able to do it well in order to do it poorly. She comes up to the note and goes around it, but you have to know where that right note is in order to hit the wrong one, and I don't know how she does what she does."

What did he learn from the life of Florence Foster Jenkins?

"I think finding something that makes you happy, I guess, not to sound overly simple. And burying yourself in it. The suspension of judgment, not just as an actor, but as a person. Most people have a bit of this fear of being judged and tend to judge other people. The critics killed her possibly, but at the same time she really embraced doing what she loved regardless of what people thought. I think that last moment in the movie when she says, 'People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing.' That's such a moving idea. It's hard to let go of that critical eye that we have and we fear that other people look at us through. But she seemed pretty happy."

"Florence Foster Jenkins" opens on Friday, August 12.

Watch Simon Helberg talk about "Florence Foster Jenkins" on The View:

Watch the trailer to "Florence Foster Jenkins":