Okay, so what really happened here? Bill Prady, who created the show alongside Chuck Lorre, may be able to explain it. “Scott said, ‘I have to have a last name,’ and I said, ‘Will we ever be able to read it?’ and he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘All right, well, make sure it’s Greeked out enough that you can’t make it out.’ And he said, ‘What should I put there?’ And I think I might have said ‘Teller’ because of Penn and Teller, Penny Teller. I think it might have amused me in the moment. But I had assurances it wasn’t going to be seen, that Scott just needed it for the visual shape of the block of type.
“But, emphatically, Penny’s last name is not Teller,” Prady continued. “I don’t know how that image of the shipping label exists and how fans were able to see it or make it out. It’s like the roommate agreement — they had to fill pages with words. Prop people have to make things that will look real, but the intent is that you will not see them.” (Prady has, apparently, not spent a ton of time on the internet, because fans of shows will take whatever blurry images they can find and create fan theories accordingly.)
“I do remember that shipping label!” Cuoco exclaimed, speaking to Jessica Radloff as well. “Scott London was so brilliant. He really took it seriously, and had no idea that this last name would be such a thing!” As for Jim Parsons, he just thought the whole thing was funny and just a tiny bit frustrating. “I mean, she’s not Prince or Madonna! She’s a normal girl in Pasadena named Penny something,” Parsons joked. “But yes, very early on, I remember looking at the mail in a scene, and it said Penny London. We all found it amusing in a charming way that the prop master had given her his last name. It was just perfect, Scott. “
Still, like fans of the show, Parsons did start to wonder about why Penny never got her own last name. “And I’m such a curmudgeon, it’s the kind of thing where I look back now and think, ‘This really is so funny this went on.’ I remember the time this was a whole topic of conversation and I was like, As if we don’t have enough to think about, we gotta talk about superstition about giving her a goddamn last name!’ But now I think it’s fun.”