She sprouted and bloomed before our boob tube-viewing eyes in the early ‘90s, and now Mayim Bialik is popping up again in prime time TV’s hottest scripted half hour. The Blossom star makes a “tease” appearance on the season finale of The Big Bang Theory on May 24. The guest shot reportedly heralds the beginning of a multi-episode arc resuming next fall on the CBS hit.

Bialik left Hollywood—save for brief returns in the HBO comedies Fat Actress and Curb Your Enthusiasm—to earn a bachelors degree and, in 2007, a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. She then took a break from academia to raise her two sons—she and husband Michael Stone have a four-and-a-half year-old and an almost-two-year-old, whom she homeschools at their Studio City house. Recently the sitcom vet returned to acting with guest roles in ABC Family’s Secret Life of the American Teenager, FOX’s ’Til Death and the upcoming feature Chicago 8, in which she plays 1960s anti-war activist Nancy Kurshan. Now a fully committed vegan and “avid student of all things Jewish,” Bialik is, at age 34, outspoken in her own right. In this exclusive interview she looks back on her teenage struggles during her Blossom years, reveals her personal issues with a not-so-nice SNL skit featuring fellow Big Bang guest star Sara Gilbert and ponders how a “MacGruber-ized” and eco-friendly Blossom might save the world today.

As Blossom you were ‘90s TV’s quirky girl. And now you’re starting an arc on the ultimate misfit sitcom—
Nerd show. (Laughs.)

The ultimate nerd show, The Big Bang Theory. What can you tell us about your arc that begins with the May 24 season finale?
I don’t know much more than you do. I’m sort of the tease—I’m the last episode of this season—as a possible, maybe love interest for Sheldon. And Sheldon is going to be exactly the same Sheldon that he was before, just with this sort of possibility of what might it look like for him to possibly, conditionally, maybe be enticed.

But you’ll be in at least one episode next season?
I’m hoping to be confirmed from being sort of on hold to on hold, but I’m not sure yet, exactly. I’m waiting myself (to find out).

From Blossom to Big Bang and everything you’ve experienced in between with your academic career, what dimension to “braniacs” or “mind geeks” or whatever do you think is missing in prime time, especially in sitcoms, that you’d like to bring to the mix?
I mean, look, I think what Big Bang has done … I don’t know if it has normalized intellectualism but it’s brought a realness to a personality that absolutely exists in people’s worlds. But I think the reason that Big Bang works, and I hope the reason that my character works, is because they’re making people and not caricatures. I mean, obviously these four guys are caricaturish but they also are people, and they’re different. I’ve met at least three dozen kinds of nerds. They’re showing four kinds of nerds. And I was kind of wondering if my character would be at some point an ugly duckling revealed. We’re not sure. At this point, she’s pretty gooney! There are also nerdy women who are stunning and wear high heels and miniskirts as a policy. My character is not one of those. (Laughs.)

That’s always been one of your identifying qualities via Blossom. You recently reunited with some of your castmates on the FOX sitcom ‘Til Death. What do you make of Blossom’s place in pop culture—then and now?
I think it’s easy to not dismiss Blossom but to think of it as, “Oh, it was just a funny kid’s show in the nineties.” We like to point out that we were a family show. We were on during prime time, and we got ratings in the top 25 in good weeks. And we were one of the first shows about a girl who was not a bimbo or a nerd. She was kind of a normal expression of what young women are: complicated, and sometimes they want to be popular and sometimes they want to be smart and sometimes they can be both. And that was unusual back then.

If you look at shows about girls now, you’ll see a lot of very sort of manicured, very glamorous, very thin and gorgeous and stunning 14-year-olds. And as much as I appreciate people saying I was so cute, Jenna (von Oy) and I on the show were not glamorous and wearing designer clothing or anything like that. So the industry has definitely changed a lot, for women especially. So I look back at Blossom as a sort of innocent, good, clean fun period of television history that I remember.

But there also were episodes about sex and drugs and things like that. It was not an afternoon kind of kid’s show. I’m not saying we were doing Shakespeare, but we dealt with things that were enough to get sponsors and network up in arms. (Laughs.)

Blossom was known for sort of breaking new ground in so-called “very special episodes.”
Right. (Laughs.)

What did they mean to you personally as a teenager? And what did you think of the backlash to that—for instance, the Saturday Night Live spoof?
First of all I think the fact that we had a show about a divorced father raising three kids when their mom split just because she wanted to live her own life—in 1990, that wasn’t part of our culture’s vernacular. Fathers were with children because the wife, God forbid, died. Not because she wanted to be a musician in Paris. So our whole show was sort of a “very special concept.” (Laughs.) That’s where some of the jumping off for that was.

Television in the nineties was sort of goofy all around. We were on after Fresh Prince. And the clothing was crazy, and the tone of the sitcom was very interesting.

In terms of the SNL skit, that’s one of the highest compliments that one can be paid. We were also featured in MAD magazine, and I grew up reading MAD magazine. They did a parody of Blossom … and as long as MAD magazine knew who I was, it was great.

Did SNL need to use prosthetics on the actress (Melanie Hutsell) who played me? I don’t think so. And that (decision) was just sort of a personal comment. And also Sara Gilbert was the guest that week. And I also think SNL has a lot of talented women come on the show who basically ridicule other actresses. And I think we can move above a catty level with actresses these days. But it is a tremendously high compliment to be enough part of (popular) culture that SNL does a spoof of you. Personal issues aside, it was incredible. You’ve arrived in the industry when SNL, or for me MAD magazine, are spoofing you.

You sound like an old soul.
(Laughs.)

But as a kid was there a part of you that was like, “Oh, God, why are they doing this?!”
I was a pretty weird kid. I’ve always been very sensitive. And I was sensitive when anyone teased me, whether it was at school or in the public press. But I always just was one of those kids who makes a much better adult than I do a kid. (Laughs.)

That was part of the charm of Blossom: She was a very “old” teenager. The show and the character was sort of the quintessential, quirky, non-misfit misfit. She was a regular girl. How much of that was Mayim?
When Don Reo created the show, he wanted a sort of Catcher in the Rye sort of show. He wanted a coming of age of an intelligent child. So I think that really was what his goal was. But I think once he got to interact with me, he actually had direct access to a girl that kind of was living that balance. To have a show based around a girl who did not fit the general mold of what beauty was, even by 1990s standards, I think was very brilliant of Don and of NBC.

So along with my offbeat appearance I had a very offbeat personality. And Don took advantage of getting to know me and Joey and Jenna and really trying to make our characters real. And I think that’s part of what made our show—however successful you want to say it was, we were on for five years. The last season was a little bit spotty. (Laughs.) But people liked seeing kind of real characters, and I think that was that was because he used a lot of our personalities.

Sitcoms today are much more kind of real than our show was and other shows were at that time. But for that time I think that’s what made it work.

Getting your doctoral in neuroscience, how has that helped you better understand the neuroses of Hollywood?
It’s a great question. And people (wonder) when they hear especially that I chose not to stay in academia but wanted to be home with my kids and nurse exclusively and home school—acting has really only been in the last year since our little guy is older. What I say is I use my degree all the time. I believe strongly in the field of neuroscience and neuropsychiatry in which I was trained. I’m not saying I understand people perfectly but to go through that kind of study, there’s no way it cannot affect your life on all fronts.

For me as a person of faith, I draw tremendous joy from my understanding of quantum physics. I draw tremendous joy from my understanding of how sometimes people hurt you when they want to love you. These are all big, complicated things that occur in the human experience that I’m grateful to my training for providing me with. I love being able to play with numbers. I love being able to explain things to my son when he starts asking, “Well, why is the moon here at night and the sun here at day?” I love being able to say more than, “Oh, the moon’s going night-night.” You know? (Laughs.) I love being a science person. That’s why I studied it in the first place.

Does this give you a better understanding of some of the quirks of Hollywood and celebrity in general? You’ve always been pretty grounded, but do you have more respect for those neuroses?
I do. I’m often asked about public figures who’ve displayed interesting behavior. Not just the tragic stories … but things like Britney Spears shaving her head in public. It’s nice to be able to not come from a gossip perspective. Kind of a pet peeve of mine is gossip, and I don’t like to gossip and I don’t like to be involved in gossip, but it’s nice to be asked things like, “What do you think of Britney Spears?” I’m not that popular at cocktail parties when I say things like this, but it really is my understanding that she’s a person who’s exhibiting some signs of distress or possibly postpartum (depression) … That’s how I view the world and that’s how I view people, whether they’re in Hollywood or not.

I think it’s also given me a lot more patience when people annoy me or reject me or don’t act the way I want when a producer is so caught up in his own whatever or her own narcissism—it gives me more compassion for them. I try not to be an angry person, and the industry can make you very, very angry. (Laughs.)

Obviously your upbringing in a strict and modest home helped you considerably.
And therapy. (Laughs.)

Therapy is always good. How did you and your teenage co-stars manage to get through that and come out of it not only pretty good kids but also not at each other’s throats?
I don’t know that I have the perfect answer to that. Joey and Jenna had been acting since they were kids, since they were toddlers. They were much more skilled than I at a lot of these aspects of the industry. So I learned from them. We all tended to keep to ourselves and none of us were really party animals. We all sort of were serious. Jenna was kind of the most popular. Like in any school, if you have three kids—it was me, Joey and Jenna. She was the popular one. Joey was the hunk who was also pretty quiet. And I was just the nerd. We fell into our roles very nicely.

It wasn't totally devoid of drama, our years together. But I don’t know. I guess none of us were strong enough personalities (to provoke conflict) and our parents and agents did a lot of the discussions about things.

So, unlike revelations in one of the two new Little House on the Prairie books, the Blossom culture was not one where the kids were pitted against each other?

No. I think that stuff happened more on levels that Joey, Jenna and I probably weren’t even realizing. Meaning if there were discussions or negotiations we were usually left out of it. Which is good. I mean, it’s hard. Now that I look back, our parents’ lives were spent pretty much on the set. And it gets boring when you’re an adult. When you’re children, it’s cool and you’re doing all this stuff. But I kind of tried to stay out of it and I’m glad that I was able to.

Audiences have always connected to you as a real, down-to-earth person. And certainly you represented a kind of ethnic look at a time in prime time when few did. What responsibilities did you feel at the time, if any, to represent that portion of the world—and how odd was that considering the Russo family was Italian?
Actually, Blossom’s mother was Jewish, and they did a couple of episodes about her Jewish identity. I don’t think I realized (the responsibility) at the time. Now that I’m an adult—I did a minor in Hebrew and Jewish studies, so I studied a bit on the sociology of Judaism and stuff like that—obviously it’s very significant to have a sitcom where there’s even kind of a mention of a character being Jewish.

But I think now that I’m older and I’m a little bit more comfortable with taking a step back and realizing what the rest of the women in the industry look like, or what the rest of people generally look like, I realize how unusual it was and how important it was. I hear that from a lot of people who come up to me and say, “You made me feel okay to have a prominent nose or a pointy chin.” I was a teenager struggling through all of that stuff myself. If it helped someone feel more comfortable, then it’s a pretty neat kind of side effect. Obviously now that I’m an adult and I’m more outspoken especially as kind of an observant Jewish person, it’s a tremendous responsibility. But also it’s a blessing as well to speak from my experience and not to tell people how they should live their life.

It’s okay to be a person of faith. It’s okay to have concepts of modesty or things that are important to you. I get to be a person just like you. I get to learn and I get step forward and step back—all that stuff.

It’ll be nice to see you back on TV, tipping the scales back from the 14-year-old and 20-year-old high-end fashion models to an image that’s more realistic.
Sure. I wrote today for Christina Kelly’s blog. She actually interviewed me for Sassy a million years ago. That was a feminist young women’s magazine. I just wrote a blog today about body image and what it’s like to not be size zero in Hollywood even though by general standards of the country I’m still smaller than most people think actors should be. So, yeah, this is an important issue for boys as well with eating disorders and body image issues.

One of your earliest guest roles was on MacGyver—which, of course, is now an SNL sketch-turned-feature film spoof that precedes an actual MacGyver motion picture now in the works. If MacGyver can save the world with a paper clip and a rubber band, what would a holistic Blossom do to rescue the planet?

(Laughs.) Whatever it is, it would involve pesticide-free flowers and a hemp pack.