Simon Maxwell Helberg (born December 9, 1980) is an French-American actor and comedian. He is known for playing Howard Wolowitz in the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–2019), for which he won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, and as Cosmé McMoon in the film Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), for which he was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. Helberg has appeared on the sketch comedy series MADtv, and has further performed in films such as Old School (2003), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), A Serious Man (2009) and Annette (2021). Early life Helberg was born on December 9, 1980, in Los Angeles. He is the son of actor Sandy Helberg and casting director Harriet Helberg (née Birnbaum). He was raised Jewish, "Conservative to Reform but more Reform as time went on." Helberg attended middle and high school at the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California, with Jason Ritter, who later became his roommate at New York University. He attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he trained at the Atlantic Theater Company. Career Since the early 2000s, Helberg performed with comedian Derek Waters as the sketch comedy duo Derek & Simon. In 2007, the two starred together in Derek and Simon: The Show, a web series they created with comedian Bob Odenkirk for the comedy website Super Deluxe. They previously made two short films "Derek & Simon: The Pity Card" (co-starring Zach Galifianakis and Bill Hader) and "Derek & Simon: A Bee and a Cigarette" (co-starring Casey Wilson and Emily Rutherfurd) and had a pilot deal with HBO in 2005. One of Helberg's earliest jobs in television was briefly joining the cast of MADtv for one season in 2002. Helberg appeared in the 2002 feature film Van Wilder as one of the geeky students for whom Van Wilder was throwing a party. He had a minor role in the 2003 movie Old School. In 2004, he was in two episodes of Reno 911!: Student Driver in "Raineesha X" and Hooker Buying Son in "Not Without My Mustache". He had a small role in the sixth episode of Quintuplets, "Get a Job", as a man called Neil working behind the counter at a shoe shop where Paige and Patton were working. In 2004, he