“The Big Bang Theory” spent a decade as one of television’s most popular shows, the story of nerdy roommates and their pals. That core cast expanded over the years, but from the very start, it was actor Jim Parsons who was the breakout star, thanks to his hilarious performance as socially inept but endlessly irritating genius Sheldon Cooper.
While portraying an iconic character in a hit sitcom can be financially rewarding, it can also become creatively stifling if an actor becomes typecast. “Happy Days” star Henry Winkler, for example, made a conscious effort when that show ended to play the most un-Fonzie-like roles he could, and Parsons faced a similar struggle after a decade of “The Big Bang Theory.” After the series concluded, he’s expanded his horizons considerably, and fans are understandably excited to watch him stretch out even further in the future.
It’s been an amazing journey from Texas to Tinseltown, and it’s far from over. To find out more, read on for the transformation of “Big Bang Theory” star Jim Parsons.
His first acting role was playing a bird in a school play at age 6
Jim Parsons was born and raised in Houston, Texas. Even as a youngster, he gravitated toward the stage, landing his first role at the age of six: playing a bird in an elementary school play. “I don’t know that I was good,” Parsons told the Los Angeles Times, “But I obviously caught a bug.”
His mother, Houston schoolteacher Judy Parsons, had an inkling that her son would one day become a successful thespian, even at such an early age. “He said he wanted to be an actor, movie star, from the time he was about six years old,” she explained in an interview with the Houston Chronicle, remembering his childhood ambitions. Her memory was spot on, based on what her son told the same newspaper. “I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be an actor,” the future “Big Bang Theory” sensation said. “I used to say ‘movie star’ when I was younger, but I knew what I meant.”
However, she was initially hesitant about supporting that goal, realizing the instability and uncertainty of an actor’s life. “As his mom, I wasn’t exactly sure that this was the most secure career path to follow,” she recalled, “but I came to realize that it was the only path that would even come close to satisfying the passion he had in his heart for acting.”
Another school production led him to really understand acting
While growing up, Jim Parsons’ desire to become an actor was inspired by the TV sitcoms that he and his family would watch together. “Where I am now, working on a television sitcom, is sort of coming full-circle for me as the first ‘acting’ I was really exposed to and affected by was indeed the work being done on television sitcoms,” he explained to the Houston Chronicle. “There was a kind of musicality to the actors’ timing and rhythms that I really responded to,” he told The New York Times.
The comedic sensibility he’d been exposed to via those sitcoms (among his favorites were “Three’s Company” and “The Cosby Show”) came to fruition when, as a teenager, he was cast in a school production of slapstick farce “Noises Off.” “All we had was each other, and our very basic mastery of the play, but at our first performance we pulled together and relied on each other and everything clicked,” he told the Times. “I felt totally comfortable in this warped world that was far away from the real world. And I wanted to keep doing it.”
After college he joined a repertory theater company in Texas
After graduating high school, Jim Parsons struggled with the notion of whether he should pursue acting professionally or leave it behind and move on to something that offered a regular paycheck. “I had a couple of years, after high school, where I tried to leave it behind, largely due to my feeling that it seemed a risky career choice, but I quickly realized that I was very unhappy not acting and started majoring in theater at the University of Houston,” he told the Houston Chronicle.
For a period, Parsons flirted with the idea of meteorology as a fallback if acting didn’t pan out. “I wanted to be a weatherman for a while,” he told Newsweek, revealing that it was mandatory to take at least one science course, and he chose meteorology. That class, however, proved to be a big bust. With theater consuming his life, he put little effort into studying meteorology. “And I failed,” he said. “It was the only F I ever got.”
It was during this time that he began performing in university productions, more than two dozen of them. He and some other young actors founded an experimental theater troupe, Infernal Bridegroom Productions, and he blossomed as a performer by appearing in 17 wildly diverse productions during a three-year period, ranging from classic musical “Guys & Dolls” to German expressionist plays. “There’s no learning like the doing,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Houston Chronicle. “When you’re doing that many different types of things on that many types of stages, you don’t know the effect it has while you’re doing it.”
He contemplated a career in academia
After earning his degree from the University of Houston, Jim Parsons headed to the University of San Diego to work toward a master’s degree in cooperation with the city’s famed Old Globe Theater. The course’s director, Rick Seer, initially had doubts about accepting Parsons into the prestigious two-year program, with just seven students each year invited. “Jim is a very specific personality,” Seer told University of San Diego Magazine. “He’s thoroughly original, which is one reason he’s been so successful. But we worried, ‘Does that adapt itself to classical theater, does that adapt itself to the kind of training that we’re doing?’ But we decided that he was so talented that we would give him a try and see how it worked out.”
Parsons excelled and earned his MFA. At that point in his life, though, he faced yet another crossroads: should he take what he’d learned about acting and utilize it within an academic setting or set out to become a full-fledged actor? “I really loved school,” Parsons said during a roundtable interview for Newsweek. “If they offered a doctorate in acting, I’d still be there,” he added. “It was so safe! I went to grad school. I kept going as long as they’d have me.”
Ultimately, Parsons decided to throw caution to the wind and pursue his dreams. He moved to New York, and it didn’t take him long to land roles in Off-Broadway productions.
He landed a Quiznos commercial
It was in New York City that Jim Parsons’ fledgling acting career really took root. In addition to Off-Broadway stage roles, he also began getting jobs that required him to act in front of a camera. Among the first of these was a TV commercial for the Quizno’s sandwich chain, with Parsons playing a guy who’d been raised by wolves. “The first time I saw Jim on TV it was in commercials,” the actor’s mother, Judy Parsons, told the Houston Chronicle. “You don’t know when commercials are going to come on, so we would just happen to catch him in one occasionally, and when we did we would scream, ‘Jim’s on TV!’ and make everyone else come into the room.”
Before long, he began landing guest-starring roles in TV dramas, including comedy “Ed,” and a recurring role in courtroom drama “Judging Amy.” “Seeing his name across my TV was a crazy feeling,” his mom recalled.
Around this time, he also began to land small movie roles in films, including “Garden State,” “10 Items or Less,” and “School for Scoundrels.” It would be an audition for a television sitcom, however, that was about to change his life forever.
Being cast as Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory changed everything
When casting “The Big Bang Theory,” a new sitcom about nerdy geniuses, series creator Chuck Lorre was blown away when unknown actor Jim Parsons auditioned for the role of brilliant but socially awkward Sheldon Cooper. “We knew we were witnessing something astonishing,” Lorre told the Houston Chronicle of Parsons’ audition. “He’s a force of nature. He really is that good.” Interviewed by USA Today, Lorre pointed to Parsons’ precision and physicality. “I’ve never seen someone come along like this, with so much uncanny skill and intuition,” he marveled.
If it seemed to Lorre that Parsons understood Sheldon completely, it was because the actor had already deeply connected with the character. “I felt very strongly about the structure of it and the way they laid out the character and the way he talked,” Parsons told the Houston Chronicle. “It was a one-in-a-million match.”
For Parsons, the key to unlocking Sheldon was his tendency to say whatever popped into his mind without any regard for how it might affect whoever heard it. “He says things all the time that could hurt someone’s feelings,” Parsons told NPR. “He doesn’t check it through a filter and go, ‘Oh, they’ll be fine with this.’ He skips that barrier completely. He just says it.”
He made his Broadway debut
Jim Parsons got his professional start Off-Broadway, and in 2011, he made his debut on Broadway. At the height of his fame from “The Big Bang Theory,” he appeared in the play “The Normal Heart,” winning a Theatre World Award for his performance.
Parsons enjoyed his return to the stage so much that he was back the following year to star in a Broadway production of “Harvey.” Playing Elwood P. Dowd, Parsons’ character believes that he’s accompanied by a six-foot-tall rabbit named Harvey, who can be seen by no one but him. Initially a hit back in the 1940s, the play was adapted into a 1950 feature film starring James Stewart. As Parsons told The New York Times, he prepared for the role with the same level of precision that he’d been bringing to Sheldon Cooper. “I try to master every facet of a character in order to build a safety net for myself, so I can go on to take more risks to create someone really distinct,” he said. “If I’m not making a choice with each and every line, then why are you bothering watching me?”
He returned to Broadway in 2015 to play the title character in “An Act of God.” “It’s like having a mild drug trip, completely sober, for an hour-and-a-half,” Parsons told Variety of portraying the Almighty onstage each night. “It’s as much fun and as much terror as I’ve ever had at one time.”
He came out as gay in a magazine interview
In that 2012 interview with The New York Times to promote “Harvey,” one sentence stood out: “Mr. Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship.” Up to that point, Parsons had never commented on his sexuality, something he addressed a decade later. “I grew up in a time where the first thing I think of every time on this topic is when Ellen [DeGeneres] came out,” he said in a 2022 interview with Variety, explaining his hesitancy to come out. “As much as it helped ultimately, it was also f***ing scary as a gay person who wanted … a career for themselves, in the same road, in the same industry.”
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Parsons admitted that while he wasn’t hiding his sexuality, he “was scared enough to make it my mission not to talk about it … And I was scared that it might cause trouble, quote unquote, for our big television show.”
Ultimately, his concern was unwarranted when the news of his coming out made brief headlines before fading quickly. “It got picked up, and it was briefly a thing just as far as like there was some news to it or whatever,” he said, “but it faded away pretty damn quickly and was kind of not a big deal.”
He married Todd Spiewak in NYC
The long-term partner of Jim Parsons, alluded to in that New York Times profile, was Todd Spiewak. Five years after Parsons came out, he and Spiewak took their relationship to the next level by tying the knot. The two were married in 2017, in an intimate ceremony taking place in the Rainbow Room, high above the streets of New York at the top of Rockefeller Center.
The previous year, Parsons celebrated their 14th anniversary via an Instagram post that he’s since deleted. “I met this guy (the one with the mic) 14 years ago today and it was the best thing that ever happened to me, no contest,” he wrote in the caption (via E! News), accompanying a vintage photo of the two singing karaoke.
After the nuptials, Parsons paid a visit to “The Late Show,” where host Stephen Colbert asked why it took 15 years to walk down the aisle. “Well, honest, I really didn’t think we cared about the act of it that much,” Parsons said, but added, “It was so much more meaningful in the moment to me than I predicted, and it’s been resonantly more meaningful to be afterward than I ever saw coming.”
He became television’s highest-paid actor
As the popularity of the show continued to grow, the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” experienced a dramatic transformation over the years. So, too, did the salaries of its stars. By the final season, Jim Parsons had become the highest-paid actor on television, earning $26.5 million during a 12-month period concluding in June 2018. That was a big bump from the first season a decade earlier when Parsons was only paid $60,000 per episode then. All told, he reportedly earned a staggering $177.7 million from his 10 seasons on “The Big Bang Theory.”
A 2017 Variety report claimed that while Parsons and his co-stars — one-time “Roseanne” star Johnny Galecki, “8 Simples Rules” alum Kaley Cuoco, Kunal Nayyar, and Simon Helberg — were all earning $1 million per episode, while former “Blossom” star Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch were making considerably less, $200,000 for each episode. In order to address that disparity, Parsons and the other four actors agreed to a $100,000-per-episode pay cut for the final two seasons, with the resulting $500,000 split between Bialik and Rauch in order to bump their salaries up to about $450,000 per episode.
While that might seem like a lot of money, it was still peanuts compared to how much money the show was making. In fact, Variety estimated at that time, with two more seasons still to go, “The Big Bang Theory” had earned $1 billion in syndication revenue.
He took on behind-the-scenes roles for Young Sheldon and Call Me Kat
With “The Big Bang Theory” heading for the home stretch, CBS was eager to keep the show’s success going. Enter “Young Sheldon,” a prequel series that followed the childhood exploits of Sheldon Cooper (played by Iain Armitage, a child actor who certainly looked familiar to viewers) growing up in Texas. Jim Parsons provided grown-up Sheldon’s narration for each episode and also embraced a new role as one of the series’ executive producers (through That’s Wonderful Productions, the production company that he and husband Todd Spiewak founded in 2015).
That’s Wonderful also produced “Call Me Kat,” a Fox sitcom starring Parsons’ TV wife, Mayim Bialik. As she explained during a session at the Television Critics Association press tour (as reported by Entertainment Weekly), when she joined “The Big Bang Theory,” it was already running on all cylinders. With “Call Me Kat,” she was undertaking a whole new challenge by creating a new show from the ground up. “I’ve never had a job like this,” she gushed.
When “Young Sheldon” ended its own run in 2024 after seven successful seasons, Parsons was offered the opportunity to play Sheldon one last time in the series finale. “I felt a slight hesitancy when they first asked, just as I thought, I don’t really want to go revisit the character,” Parsons told People. “But the way that they wrote it in was I thought so beautiful that it ended up being like this little extra coda or whatever to my experience with the character.” Added Parsons, “It was this gift of a second layer of losing it out in a way that I had never seen coming, and it was a real treat.”
He took on roles in TV film and stage
The end of “The Big Bang Theory” provided Jim Parsons with opportunities to spread his wings, both in front of and behind the camera; for example, his production company was also behind “Special,” a Netflix comedy series about a gay man with mild cerebral palsy.
Parsons also took on more acting roles, playing characters that were as far from Sheldon as possible. For example, he played a gay man who lost his partner to cancer in the Netflix film “Spoiler Alert.” He was also cast in “Hollywood,” a high-concept period drama by Ryan Murphy, whose numerous TV hits have included “Glee,” “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story,” and several others. In “Hollywood,” he portrayed a predatory talent agent hiding his sexuality, engaging in Hollywood’s infamous casting couch culture. That performance won him an Emmy nomination, and he next starred in another film, a remake of “The Boys in the Band.”
In late 2024, Parsons returned to Broadway, joining co-stars Katie Holmes and Zoey Deutch for a revival of Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town.” Appearing on “Today,” Parsons admitted that signing on for one of the all-time great American plays was a no-brainer. “That was one of those opportunities that when somebody asks you to do it, I feel, as an actor, you just do it,” he said.
