Tragic Details About The Cast Of 2 Broke Girls

The following article mentions sexual misconduct and mental health struggles.

"2 Broke Girls" brought laughter and joy to fans around the world during its run. Fans watched Max (Kat Dennings) and Caroline (Beth Behrs) go from struggling to make ends meet as diner waitresses to becoming owners of their very own cupcake store. Just as things really seemed to fall into place for Max and Caroline, the show was canceled abruptly after six seasons.

In a 2023 chat with The List, Behrs said that she'd be open to the idea of rebooting the show and having a chance to give it a proper sendoff. "I was recently watching the 'Friends' reunion, and ... I was crying the whole time, just thinking about how much I love the cast and crew of '2 Broke Girls' and how I wished we had had that way of... saying goodbye to the characters, being able to see what happened to Max and Caroline," she said.

While we're not here to guess what Max and Caroline's lives would look like now, we have to imagine that their bond would still be going strong. After all, if there's one thing series co-creator Michael Patrick King takes seriously, it's friendship. As he told Entertainment Weekly in 2021, "[T]here's nothing more significant than the strength you get from friendships in the bad times," he said. Sadly, many of the stars of "2 Broke Girls" have been through bad times of their own. 

"2 Broke Girls" star Kat Dennings started experiencing symptoms of migraines when she was 12, but her complaints were disregarded, which resulted in years of not receiving any proper treatment. "When my mom first took me to a doctor, they said, 'Oh, you'll grow out of it. It's just headaches," Dennings recalled in an interview with Flow Space. "I was told over and over, 'Oh, you're a girl, it's just hormones." A migraine is a neurological disorder that involves recurring severe pain on one side of the head, which can sometimes be confused with typical headaches. The condition won't show up on any scans or tests, so the only way it can be diagnosed is by an experienced physician.

Dennings struggled for years with pain without knowing the cause. "It took me until I was in my 20s to really get the help I needed," she said. While migraine attacks are easy to treat during their early stages, if left untreated, the symptoms would worsen and lead to chronic daily attacks. "It feels like you're lying when you cancel plans because of a migraine. [Friends] really don't understand the debilitating pain," said Dennings. She spent years trying to find the right treatment plan, and the process can be very frustrating. "I even bought this ridiculous migraine helmet that squeezes your head and eyes — it actually feels good, though it blasts spa music you can't turn off, so that's not ideal," she said.

"2 Broke Girls" was Beth Behrs' first real break as an actor, but the fame that came with it almost broke her. Behrs was working as a nanny when she received the callback for "2 Broke Girls" and had no idea the show was going to blow up the way it did. She went from a girl from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to a household name. "My whole life had changed. Overnight, there were all sorts of things that I had never experienced before, and I'm such a type A perfectionist," she told Self in 2017. Her stress level skyrocketed, and she was having panic attacks regularly. It didn't take long before it started to manifest physically. "For my job, I have to be on red carpets; this skin grossness was embarrassing," she said.

The stress affected her life so much that threatened the very thing she loved. "It's impossible for me to be successful at what I love most, which is acting and making people laugh, without making sure my body is fueled in the right way," she admitted, and she knew right there and then she needed a change. "My body was saying, 'Slow the F down.'" To cope with anxiety and stress, the actor got into tennis, cooking, meditation, and working with horses, which she shared in her book, "The Total Me-tox." Behrs went through a stunning transformation after she changed her overall lifestyle and learned to not be too hard on herself.

In 1994, Garrett Morris, who played Earl on "2 Broke Girls,"  was shot in the chest and arm when two men who attempted to rob him in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The then 57-year-old actor was rushed to a nearby hospital and he survived. 

Three decades later, the "Saturday Night Live" alum opened up about the traumatic event in an interview with People. "It ricocheted into my lumbar number five. That's the only reason I survived. The doctors told me I might not walk or run again," he said. While the injuries he sustained were not fatal, the recovery was still long and difficult. "Messes up my intestines, I had to have a colostomy for eight months. And it winds up with me having about 10 major operations because when I got to the hospital I was in a coma," he shared in a 2012 sitdown with the Archive of American Television. 

Morris also said that a producer on "Martin," which he was on for three seasons, cut him from the sitcom when he was still in the hospital. He was blindsided by the decision, but surviving a near-death experience shaped his response. "For some strange reason, they decided to get rid of me then," he stated. "I knew I'd been wronged, I knew that I'd been mistreated ... But my thing was, I don't like you even, so I don't want to even fight to be with you."

Matthew Moy, who played Han on "2 Broke Girls,' had a stroke one week into filming Season 2 in 2012. "My brain was hemorrhaging in the middle of the night," the actor recalled on the "Behind the Beauty" podcast. "I noticed something was funny in my body because I couldn't make a fist or write." He initially brushed it off as tiredness, but when his symptoms persisted after two days, Moy realized that something was wrong. "I drove myself to urgent care ... the doctor never came. I waited for like three hours, so I just checked myself out and went home and called my main doctor." Over the next two weeks, Moy continued working on set, trying to secure an appointment while the initial numbness spread across his body. "I started gaining weakness in the right side of my body and lost functionality and all my motor skills," he said. 

At that time, Moy had also begun voicing Lars Barriga on "Steven Universe." When the animated series wrapped in 2020, Moy shared a word of gratitude on Instagram and opened up about the health issues he'd tried to keep a secret. "I didn't know how to tell people my right side was paralyzed," Moy wrote. He tried his best to hide it, both behind the scenes and on set. "It's a weird thing to tell people. I think I lied and told people I sprained my ankle," he wrote.

After the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Jennifer Coolidge, who brought the laughs as Sophie on "2 Broke Girls," found herself in a dark headspace. "I was reading tragic news stories on a daily basis, had a fatalistic approach, and assumed the virus was going to win," she told The Guardian in 2021. "I knew people who lost their lives and was convinced we wouldn't make it through. I wasn't thinking about work, because I didn't think we'd be alive." When "The White Lotus" creator Mike White reached out to her in the second half of 2020, she wasn't exactly feeling up for taking on an acting role at that time. As she said in a separate chat with Vogue, "I'd been on a real self-destructive ride in my house in New Orleans, just eating three or four pizzas and ice cream sandwiches all day long."

Die-hard "The White Lotus" fans might not know this, but Coolidge almost passed on the role. "I was just like, I can't possibly go on camera looking like this," she said. "I really was so close to not doing it. In fact, I don't know if Mike even knows how close I came to not doing it." However, as we all know, she did end up doing it, and she's expressed nothing but gratitude to White for the role. As she said during her acceptance speech at the 2023 Golden Globes, "You make people want to live longer, and I didn't."  

After attending Berklee College of Music, Eric Andre, who played Deke in eight episodes of "2 Broke Girls," headed to New York City for a music industry internship, but he ultimately decided to go all in on a comedy career instead. He began booking shows at bars and venues around Manhattan, but money was incredibly tight when he was first getting started. So much so, he even wound up homeless. "I would go up onstage and ask people if I could sleep at their house," Andre recalled to People. "I slept in the park a few nights...I would sleep in Union Square or St. Vartan Park in Murray Hill. I would try to find safe parks to sleep in, then I'd wake up at 5:00 in the morning terrified."

To try to make ends meet, Andre worked odd jobs, including working at a dog daycare center. "I made seven bucks an hour, driving dogs around in a van," he said. As cute as that might sound, his experience working with pooches all day wasn't always so adorable. "I was constantly getting sick," he said. "Every time you're dealing with that many dogs, you would rub your nose, you'd kind of forget, you'd get an allergy attack, rub your nose, and then all the viruses [would get you]."

Gilles Marini played Nicolas on "2 Broke Girls," the head chef at the pastry school Max attends. Outside of the show, Marini is arguably best known for "Sex and the City: The Movie" as Samatha Jones' next-door lover. Marini rose to international fandom for the role, but in real life, it attracted a lot of inappropriate attention. "I was approached by extremely powerful people, especially after 'Sex and the City,'" he told People. "I became a piece of meat for many executives in Hollywood."

Marini went on to note that he ended up in a number of situations with higher-ups where he felt his job was on the line. "I told them to their face that this is not going to fly. This is not who I am... If this job entails me bending over, it's not going to work for me," he said. 

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the actor felt he could come forward about his own experiences regarding harassment in the industry. As an advocate for the #MeToo movement, Marini noted that many men feel like they can't speak up about being sexually harassed or abused. "And the reason is because it's a stigma, it's a shame," he said. "When a young man is affected by being raped, or sexually harassed, or touched...you will never hear, but those people exist."

Nick Zano, who played Johnny on "2 Broke Girls," and longtime girlfriend Leah Renee Cudmore became parents for the first time when they welcomed their son in 2016. Two years later, their daughter was born. The pregnancy was difficult, and the baby also arrived prematurely. "Our baby came into this world and went straight into the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit)," Zano wrote on Instagram three months after his daughter's birth. "About 24 hours after arriving, she needed a life-saving surgery, one that required her to fight through 9 hours of surgery then another 2-hour emergency procedure after that surgery." The actor shared that his daughter spent the first month of her life in the NICU.

During this traumatic period, Zano was supposed to film "DC's Legends of Tomorrow," but he decided to step away from the series for the sake of his family. "Taking time off a tv show isn't as easy as it sounds and there are so many moving parts in order to do so," he wrote. For three months, Zano held off announcing his daughter's arrival to the world because he worried they weren't out of the woods just yet. "She has been doing so well in recovery I was afraid of changing ANYTHING in the slightest way, including sharing her arrival," he wrote. 

Brooke Lyons, the actor who played Peach Landis on "2 Broke Girls," was diagnosed with scoliosis in high school, which is a sideways curvature of the spine. While most cases are mild and don't involve surgeries or even treatment, some worsen with time. In Lyons' case, she had to wear a back brace 18 hours a day, which she took off during her dance lessons. However, her condition worsened in college so she had surgery. "After I had back surgery, I couldn't dance for a year," she told CT Insider in 2008. 

Lyons began dancing when she was a toddler, and by junior high, she was regularly commuting from Connecticut to New York for dance class. Her passion for dancing also took her around the world. "I went to New England Ballet School in Connecticut and danced in their company. In the summer, I studied with the Boston Ballet. I've also gone to France to study. I was totally, madly in love with dance," she said. 

There's something of a silver lining here: Lyons decided to give acting a shot when she found out she couldn't dance. "I missed performing, and I had never tried theater of any kind and had never really even thought about it," she said. With time, Lyons got back to dancing recreationally, but to this day, she still suffers from back pain.

Federico Dordei played Luis, a waiter at the Williamsburg Diner in "2 Broke Girls." Despite only being in eight episodes, Luis very quickly became a fan-favorite character. However, after filming a few episodes, he was out of the picture. "They dropped [Luis] completely without any notice, nothing," the actor told Culture War Reporters in 2015. "It was pretty brutal because you work with someone for five months every single day."

Dordei told the outlet that he believes things took a turn for him after he had what he thought was a harmless conversation with some of the show's writers at a party. "[I] said I really loved the writing for Luis, but that the next two episodes were not as funny for that character," he recalled. "It was a simple fun chat between co-workers while enjoying ourselves."

It wasn't so fun when one of the writers apparently repeated this conversation to Michael Patrick King. And according to Dordei, King didn't take this so well. "He calls me and rips me a new a**h**e. Got me on the phone and shredded me to pieces, asking how dare I talk sh**, I should be lucky he gave me any lines at all," Dordei said. Though King assured Dordei he wasn't fired, Luis was eventually written off the show. "I was phased out slowly without even letting me know. Honestly, I'm still hurt by all this," Dordei said. 

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, or needs help with mental health, contact the relevant references below:

• Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or call RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
• Reach the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.