"Flight Attendant" star Kaley Cuoco recently had some real life drama in the skies.
During a Jan. 8 appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Cuoco shared that her 9-month-old daughter, Matilda, requires white noise to fall sleep. So, Cuoco, 38, and her partner, Tom Pelphrey, 41, packed a sound machine for their baby's first plane ride over Thanksgiving.
When Matilda got fussy, Cuoco whipped out the gadget. The infant stopped crying and dozed off, and her parents both breathed a sigh of relief. But moments later, Cuoco and Pelphrey received bad news from a steward.
“He’s like, ‘Hey, one of our passengers would love it if you could turn the sound machine off.’ And I’m sitting there, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’” Cuoco recalled on Kimmel. “And I can feel Tom be like, ‘Hey, ask the passenger if she wants to hold our screaming child when we turn it off.’ I mean, the ice went into his veins.”
“I couldn’t believe, by the way, that she asked us to turn it off!” Cuoco added. “We were so angry.”
After the plane landed, Cuoco said the woman seated in front of them quipped, “Oh, so your daughter does know how to smile.”
“It was in that moment where I understood why women end up on ‘Dateline,’” Cuoco joked. “I could have strangled [her]. … I could’ve thrown that woman off the plane.”
Earlier in the interview, the actor revealed she was “terrified” about flying with Matilda.
“You see all these things on social media where people are really, truly, getting mad at these babies. Like, justice for babies!” Cuoco said. “This is ridiculous … leave them alone.” In response, the audience erupted into applause.
Last year, a mom in Australia was shamed after she shared a video of herself bouncing her baby on an airplane, near an emergency exit row.
“If you’ve traveled with a little one, how did they go to sleep?” Aliza Carr asked in the caption. “I know if my child’s life depended on it, she wouldn’t sleep in the plane bassinet, or even on us — standing, bouncing and aggressively swaying is the only way.”
Shortly after Carr shared her post, responses came flying in.
“If I was sitting at that exit row and paid for the extra leg room … I’d be so mad having this happening in front of me the whole flight!” one person wrote.
Added another, “No. A hard No! You can bounce your sweet babe in the back of the plane. I’d be pissed as passenger that was forced to watch you bounce.”
According to an etiquette expert, however, Carr did nothing wrong.
“Money doesn’t buy you the privilege of not caring about other people,” Catherne Newman told TODAY.com in September 2023. “You could have paid $1,000 for a first-class upgrade and the person next to you gets sick. This is the world of fallible human bodies, and we defer to people who are in need of space and resources. It’s not that complicated.”