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If you’re a fan of “The Big Bang Theory,” you probably can’t imagine anyone besides Jim Parsons playing Sheldon Cooper, the irritatingly brilliant protagonist around whom the rest of the main characters — Leonard and Penny Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco), Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar), Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), and Sheldon’s eventual wife Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) — all orbit. Apparently, during the casting process, Chuck Lorre had some concerns about Parsons as a performer, according to his co-creator Bill Prady.
During a 2021 appearance on the “At Home with the Creative Coalition” podcast (per People Magazine), Prady remembered exactly why Lorre didn’t want to cast Parsons. “We saw — oh God, I don’t know, 100 people?” Prady said. “And when Jim Parsons came in, he was Sheldon on a level — you know, there were people who came in and you went, ‘Okay, well, he’s kind of okay,’ ‘Oh, he’s pretty good,’ ‘Maybe he’s the guy.’ And Jim came in and he was just — from that audition, he was the Sheldon that you saw on television.”
As Prady put it, Parsons was good — too good. He was so good, in fact, that Lorre thought he could never replicate his audition. “He created that character at that audition,” Prady went on. “And he left the room and I turned and I went, ‘That’s the guy! That’s the guy! That’s the guy!’ And Chuck turned and he said, ‘Nah, he’s gonna break your heart. He’ll never give you that performance again.'”
Bill Prady had to talk Chuck Lorre into casting Jim Parsons — and knows he was right
“I have to say, in the story of my relationship with Chuck, the number of times that I’m right and Chuck is wrong may be… I’m gonna go with one,” he said. “This may be the only example of where I actually was right. And Jim Parsons came back the next day and gave us that exact same performance again. It was like, ‘This is Sheldon.'”
It’s also quite lucky that Prady talked Lorre into casting Parsons because he very nearly lost the star to a different CBS sitcom. As Parsons once told daytime host Kelly Ripa and her fellow anchor at the time, Michael Strahan, he auditioned to play Barney on “How I Met Your Mother” despite not even remotely matching the character’s intended physical appearance, which Parsons said was a “big lug of a guy.” Obviously, Neil Patrick Harris ended up playing Barney, and everything shook out exactly as it was supposed to.”Look, it all worked out fine,” Parsons told the hosts. “Neil’s better for the part, let’s be honest, and it all went that way.”
Jim Parsons did return to play Sheldon Cooper in a second series — would he come back again?
Thankfully, Chuck Lorre was overruled when it came to casting Jim Parsons on “The Big Bang Theory” — because Parsons has actually now played Sheldon Cooper on two different hit shows. In 2017, “Young Sheldon,” a prequel about the character starring Iain Armitage as a young Parsons, started airing on CBS and became hugely popular in its own right (its own spin-off “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” featuring characters from young Sheldon’s family, kicked off in 2024), and Parsons appeared sporadically on that series as — bear with me — old Sheldon. So will Parsons come back for a sequel called, I don’t know, “Old Sheldon” one day? Don’t hold your breath.
“Look, never say never to anything,” Parsons told E! News after his final appearance on “Young Sheldon” in May of 2024, when that show came to an end. “Life is long, God willing. But I don’t think so.”
Still, Parsons went on to provide a touching explanation of what it was like to work on a new project as Sheldon Cooper and made the point that very few actors get to end two different shows as the same character and then wait a few months for audiences to see it. “It was very, very special to do that,” Parsons told the outlet. “The feeling today is kind of odd, you know? It’s the second time now, because when we ended ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ it felt like this, too. A little bit different. You shoot that final episode and it’s wrapped for you, and then a couple of months later, it wraps for the rest of the world and it’s a very weird feeling to flood over you again like that.”
The Big Bang Theory had a whole host of casting near-misses back in the day
The fact is that “The Big Bang Theory” had a ton of casting near-misses before it ended up with its five core cast members (who were ultimately joined by Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch as series regulars later down the line, with Rauch playing Howard’s wife Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz). Kunal Nayyar almost got fired from the show entirely until Chuck Lorre stepped in to ensure he would play Raj Koothrappali, which he ultimately did for 12 seasons. Both Marisa Tomei and Macaulay Culkin were approached for roles before the series got off the ground but demurred; Tomei would have played Penny, and Culkin has never clarified (or he himself doesn’t know) who he would have played. Kevin Sussman originally auditioned to play Howard Wolowitz, and after he lost the role to Simon Helberg, the writing team at “The Big Bang Theory” crafted the role of Stuart Bloom just for him (plus, he’s now set to return in the untitled “Big Bang Theory” spin-off coming to Max at some point in the future).
The list goes on and on and on. Ringo Starr could have played Howard’s long-lost father, Sandra Bullock couldn’t make a cameo work in the series finale, and so on and so forth. Anyone who loves “The Big Bang Theory,” though, is probably quite happy that Jim Parsons did play Sheldon Cooper; he’s perfect for the role. All of “The Big Bang Theory” is streaming on Max now.