An Evening with Jim Parsons at the Paley Center NY
I can't do a better job of recapping a night of awesome with Jim Parsons than this, but here's my take on the evening. Note: I put quotation marks around what Jim says but they're definitely not verbatim quotations. I'm trying to convey the gist of what he said off of the notes I took. Apologies if I get things mixed up or out of context. I'm trying to be pretty true to what I saw and heard.
This long-winded insanity is for Paradox. I'm really grateful to be part of such a brilliant community.
I walked into the Paley Center to be informed by my waiting friend that I had literally JUST missed JP walking in. I have no idea why I stupidly thought the uptown bus would be quicker than taking the subway. *facepalm* I'd always meant to go by the Paley when it was formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, but I, alas, am a perpetrator of that whole, "I'm a New Yorker, I don't do tourist stuff." It's changed now that I've lived somewhere else for a significant amount of time, though, so I'm definitely going to try to make it back to see what the rest of the Center is about.
Before anything kicked off, I noticed that the screen in the front was showing a prominent plug to follow the Paley Center on Twitter, along with the hashtag #bigbangtheory. I was really excited about this and got out my phone, thinking to get some live tweeting going, but nobody around me that I could see was doing the same. The clicky-click noise of texting sounds really loud when you're the only one doing it... I gave up after a while since I felt like I would be bothering my seatmates and besides, I couldn't text and balance my camera at the same time. :P
Unexpected bonus: screening of the next episode, "The Plimpton Stimulation." Very cool to watch it with a big group of fans, and on a smallish movie theater-sized screen. Wish someone could put this together for every new episode.. The audience energy and enjoyment was great.
As if you could expect anything else, JP walks in to applause, and he comments that it's "like being on a game show!" The first thing he does is thank everyone for being there, and how he'd just been on Letterman where the segment is five or six minutes, and it's nice to do a longer interview. He's seriously been appearing non-stop and everywhere since last week, and despite all the inevitable Q&A repeats, he's still funny and gracious to his interviewers and his fans. The interviewer is Michelle Kung. Google tells me she's a culture reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She seemed a genuine fan of the show, and geek cred to her for mentioning it being unofficial Star Wars Day.
I don't remember the first question, which had something to do with co-stars on TBBT, but Jim does this adorable bit when he mentions that Mayim Bialik's going to be appearing: "You know, tv's Blossom!" But I immediately sat up when the second question landed, because Michelle asks him about the possibilities of Sheldon's ever developing a romantic relationship! Whoa! Jim mentions the standard reasons for no, citing Sheldon's lack of interest and his notion that pursuing such a relationship would be a waste of his resources. But he leaves room for it to happen, saying that it could happen if Sheldon's "hit over the head" or "ambushed" with it. How many great TBBT fics are there where S/P happen just this way! He does go on to say that he doesn't think that will happen (sob), since, in his opinion, the writers on TBBT don't "do drastic change" and that "part of the joy in watching [characters like those on TBBT] is seeing their predictable reactions."
Michelle mentions that the rerun episode was the one where he's "playing in a ball court." Jim: "Ball court sounds so...dignified. It was definitely a ball pit." Heh. He goes on to say that the ball pit was an example of how expansive the show can be, because it has science as its basis, and science is about everything. He mentions, though not by name, the science consultant and how he's always presented with situations (like the ball pit) by the writers, and is then asked to come up with a scientific way to get the characters there. (Btw, David Salzman, the consultant, blogs about the science behind the episodes here.)
Michelle asks Jim about his favorite arcs this season, and offers up hers: the Evil Wil Wheaton appearances. After she says this, she can do no wrong in my eyes, as Jim goes on to talk about one of my favorite people in the BBT-verse. He calls EWW a "perfect foil" for Sheldon in evilness, but that "there's nothing to dislike as a person" about the real Wil. He adds that Wil's the "nicest celebrity you could ever meet," so, of course it makes sense that someone as nice as Wil turns out to be the one who captures all of Sheldon's negative attention. "No interest in love or desire to reproduce but Sheldon has time to relish being disappointed by a celebrity."
Michelle mentions that there's an instant Bazinga! button online. I start to get a feeling that I might be rating high on the Jim Parsons stalk-o-meter, since I bookmarked that website a long time ago. Jim makes a joke that he didn't know: "Well, I don't make any money off of it!" The audience laughs, but he quickly backtracks and calls it "charming." I sort of get that feeling again that he doesn't quite get how popular he's become that people would make things like this and put it up publicly!
They move into talking about how Jim wound up playing the role of Sheldon Cooper, and he says he was initially drawn to the character because he had a certain "rhythm of speech, a convoluted awkward way of making a point," which made it a hard audition to do. He doesn't remember feeling very connected to the story in the pilot, but he felt connected to the way Sheldon talked, so much so that he felt that he should have been in at least the top 5 contenders for the role after auditioning. Auditioning to be Sheldon Cooper also wasn't fated, as Jim shared the BBT pilot was probably "1 out of 20" pilots he'd auditioned for at that time.
They get ready to show a clip intro'd as one of JP's first tv roles. At first, I think it's going to be that "raised by wolves" Quiznos commercial, but I realize after the first few seconds, it's going to be that bit from Ed. The stalk-o-meter is rising alarmingly high. I think maybe I need to lay off searching Youtube for "Jim Parsons." I think Jim is probably the only one to still be surprised when his co-stars, in this case John Slattery via Julie Bowen, tell him he's "going to do things."
We get to a really nice section where Jim talks about acting, after Michelle asks him if he feels like he's now in a place where other actors come to him for advice. "Just keep doing it. It's about consistency in your effort. You're only going to learn as you do the work." We learn about his first movie role since TBBT started, the upcoming Big Year. The title is a bird-watching term for a year in which a watcher sees as many different species of bird possible. He quips, "I'm sure [the movie's] more interesting than that [fact]." He's going to play a bird-watching blogger. Going back to acting, he says that there's no road map for anybody to follow, citing that his way just happened to be doing local theater and getting loans to finance graduate studies in acting. " His practice now is to read scripts to find out "where's the guy to play?" and go from there.
Jim is asked about his view on the trajectory of Sheldon's growth, and he shares how the writers ask him if he can do all these different things, like play the recorder, or his favorite query, "do you know how to ride a unicycle?" He says he offered to learn, only to hear "don't offer!" advice from his co-workers. He's gotten off-tangent from the original question and asks, a little flustered, "What were you asking me again?" He does this a couple of times at different places throughout the interview, to the audience's laughter. He gets back on track by saying that he never has advice for the writers on Sheldon: "I don't want to step in the way of something wonderful to happen...The writers write things and I think, I would never have thought of that...My big idea is not to derail." When asked if there's anything too out-there for him to do as Sheldon, he responds, "What can you do on network tv? Nudity? I was naked in a play once. That's different...if not worse." Laughter and internal squeeing from me at that visual. He goes on to what's a pretty painful part of the interview for me, in which he praises Chuck Lorre for a lot of things I and other members of the fandom probably don't praise Chuck for: "Chuck has vision...There are probably a lot of shows out there that are run really well, but you can't run a show better than Chuck...He's created this safe environment, and won't let the actors stray too far from character, leaving us free to experiment."
Michelle turns it over to audience question time, and what do you know, they pick the guy sitting in the row right in front of me! So as I'm bobbling my camera, trying to hide it under my bag to take some surreptitious video, I get the full force of OMG JIM IS LOOKING RIGHT AT ME!!!!!!!! I seriously have to resist the urge to flip my hair, for goodness' sake. He's asked how he learns his lines since they're so full of science and geek jargon, and if he uses cues to do it (yawn, repeat question). When Jim says he memorizes his lines, no cues, the asker "wow"s into the mic. Jim mentions that the taping schedule of TBBT leaves him time over the weekend to devote to memorizing his lines. As for the jargon, he says that 30 years ago it would have been impossible for him to play a role with lines like Sheldon's because Wiki and Youtube weren't around. This is when he mentions that's how even though he would call himself pretty well-versed in Star Wars, he had to look up things like [sic] Colonel Ackbar's line, "It's a trap!" and how to do "WHEATONNNNNNNN" because he'd "never seen any of the Star Trek movies. Everyone let out a sort of muffled gasp, but I distinctly heard one lady literally squawk at that confession! I have to think Jim heard it too, because at that point, he looks abashed. I already knew that he'd never, because Wil Wheaton and Bill Prady tweeted about it, how Jim thought the writers were making up Vulcan mind-melding, resulting in Wil having to teach Jim, who'd never heard of it before filming "The Wheaton Occurrence," how to do a mind-meld with his bowling ball. He says the geeky stuff comes in handy for his crossword puzzles. He's learned that H.G. Well's "Eloi" comes up often as a clue answer, as well as "ken" as in "out of your ken," which is "something that Sheldon says, but I don't."
He's asked about his Comic-Con experience, and how he's come to find that TBBT has "the warmest, sweetest fans." Awwww. I still can't believe I wasn't into TBBT the year I went to CC and missed my chance to see it!
Question is what was your most interesting fan reaction? "Well, they're all interesting..." Laughter. "...In a good way!" I like to think we're a classy bunch of fans, so I'm hoping he's not being treated to a replay of some nutjob fan attack in his mind. He tells a story about walking in LA, which nobody does but Jim does, because he's "lived in New York and am a freak." Seriously, nobody walks in California. I didn't own my own car when I lived there for 3 years, and my neighbor was genuinely surprised when she found out I'd been walking the 3/4 mile trip to the local library and grocery store and gave me this look like, "You....walked....somewhere?" Anyway, Jim got honked at by a car driving by, which scared him at the time. He finds out through six degrees of Facebook that a fan wrote in an open apology that she had honked to try to get his attention. He jokingly asks the audience if that fan was in attendance. Hope somehow the news get back to them that Jim received their message!
Audience member: "You're a comic genius."
Jim: "Aww... it's my mother." Wasn't really, to the best of my knowledge, which made it funny.
Question is who are your idols, and with whom would you want to work? Jim shares that he loved sitcoms as a kid, and felt a big connection to Mork, even throwing a Mork-themed birthday party. He was into Robin Williams ("What the hell was that about?!") and Three's Company with John Ritter. I was struck again with how sad it is to live in a world without John Ritter, and how awesome he could have been on TBBT. I mean to look up his episodes of 8 Simple Rules soon. Jim also mentions being oddly entranced by The Mary Tyler Moore Show, despite not being able to understand it fully as a child: "It had a depth of emotion even in a scene set in the middle of comedy...It had structure, and a rhythm." I really like how he keeps coming back to this concept of rhythm. As a pianist, I often am able to "hear" things and in that way conceptualize and relate to them. He must do the something of the same. He lists Betty White as Meemaw and Lisa Kudrow as Penny's mom as his two people to work with, even going so far to pitch it to a higher-up CBS exec. He's quick to point out again that he has no say in casting and often doesn't know with whom he'll be working on any given episode until he reads the script.
Question is what are the best and worst parts of your job? The worst part is how he often just doesn't know what's going to happen, and he likens the anxiety he feels at that moment to maybe be his life source: "Maybe what keeps me going is what gives me gas." Best line of the night. He's so honest and it all comes out so humorously! The best part of his job is moments like when he recently took his nephew with him to tape a Sesame Street segment, and he got a little emotional and teary over it. As an aunt with an adorable nephew, I totally got why he would get choked up. Sweet, sweet moment.
We take a question tweet about whether or not we'll see more Sheldon/Raj friendship developing. Jim says that what he likes about the show is how there is "no un-fun pairing." This is where I snarked to myself, "except Leonard/Penny." Zing. Man, I feel bad about saying that but like Sheldon, "I never apologize for the truth!" Ha! Jim takes some time to gush about Kunal being such a gracious person and actor. Despite having to work without talking, he's such an "unbitching, positive energy person...maybe a little wild for my taste." Hee! Raj/Sheldon BFFs is one of my most favorite relationships.
Jim mentions how surreal it is to have celebrities watch the show because recently, the cast found out Whoopi had sent them cookies and a card. (I thought this was strange, since wouldn't Whoopi know that tapings are over this time of season? Shrug.) He jokes how he told Simon Helberg (Wolowitz) he didn't even know why Whoopi would watch the show in the first place, when Simon reminds him of Wolowitz's question to EWW about "hitting that," referring to when Wil and Whoopi worked together on Star Trek. I like that on-screen and off-screen, Jim seems to be genuine friends with his cast-members, though I think he mentions Kunal, Simon, and Kaley the most, and almost never Johnny...
Question is, Sheldon has a roommate agreement with Leonard. What would you put in your roommate agreement? Kind of a weird question for me, as it kind of makes it seem like Jim = Sheldon and therefore should have a roommate agreement, which is untrue and kind of offensive to the actor, imo. It's actually a "new" question so I am kind of surprised to find out that Jim was the "bad" roommate who didn't pay the rent on time and left the common area disorderly. He says that, unlike Sheldon, he wouldn't regulate the thermostat, but would probably choose to "fight about that on a day-to-day basis." Heh. And he says to look forward to the reason why the roommate agreement was drawn up in the first place appearing in the flashback episode to be aired, saying that it begins with "a bitchfest fight over the thermostat!"
[My notes start breaking down at this point because I'm trying to video at the same time.]
Sheldon is revealing himself in his own time, Jim says, and Jim is open to "the revelation of new material...or maybe I'm lazy."
When asked if he has any scientific background like his character, he rightly says, "Those kids on Grey's Anatomy aren't doctors."
Fans tell him all the time, "Oh, I'm just like Leonard!" or some other show character, but he's never met someone who'll admit they're like Sheldon. "It's always someone pointing to someone else and saying, 'THEY'RE just like Sheldon!"
Question, is what role would you like to play on Broadway? Jim shares that he'd love to partner with a writer and launch a new character/show, but as for existing roles, he likes darker comedies. Kind of like Six Feet Under, "charming, funny, creepy...that's right up my alley."
Interview ends, all too soon, and Jim is rushed out. I left effusive praise on a comment card, hoping that if enough people would do the same, they'd continue to have great events like this one. I took my time filling it out, supposing that since he posed for pictures and gave autographs at the beginning of the event, he wouldn't do so after. But walking out of the Paley, HE'S RIGHT THERE!! I'm caught up in the mad crush around him that's trying to get him to autograph stuff. I fished out my notebook, thinking maybe I could get him to autograph my notes for this post, but I'm not really an autograph hound, and I dislike the idea of thrusting something into an actor's face and getting all up in their business, so I didn't really try that hard. I do get pushed in by the crowd until I could reach out and touch him, yeahthatclose! And then he's off and away into a big, black, tinted-windowed car. All in all, I had an amazing time.
If anyone even gets this far in this long-winded post, you're amazing too. Gold star for you.
This long-winded insanity is for Paradox. I'm really grateful to be part of such a brilliant community.
I walked into the Paley Center to be informed by my waiting friend that I had literally JUST missed JP walking in. I have no idea why I stupidly thought the uptown bus would be quicker than taking the subway. *facepalm* I'd always meant to go by the Paley when it was formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, but I, alas, am a perpetrator of that whole, "I'm a New Yorker, I don't do tourist stuff." It's changed now that I've lived somewhere else for a significant amount of time, though, so I'm definitely going to try to make it back to see what the rest of the Center is about.
Before anything kicked off, I noticed that the screen in the front was showing a prominent plug to follow the Paley Center on Twitter, along with the hashtag #bigbangtheory. I was really excited about this and got out my phone, thinking to get some live tweeting going, but nobody around me that I could see was doing the same. The clicky-click noise of texting sounds really loud when you're the only one doing it... I gave up after a while since I felt like I would be bothering my seatmates and besides, I couldn't text and balance my camera at the same time. :P
Unexpected bonus: screening of the next episode, "The Plimpton Stimulation." Very cool to watch it with a big group of fans, and on a smallish movie theater-sized screen. Wish someone could put this together for every new episode.. The audience energy and enjoyment was great.
As if you could expect anything else, JP walks in to applause, and he comments that it's "like being on a game show!" The first thing he does is thank everyone for being there, and how he'd just been on Letterman where the segment is five or six minutes, and it's nice to do a longer interview. He's seriously been appearing non-stop and everywhere since last week, and despite all the inevitable Q&A repeats, he's still funny and gracious to his interviewers and his fans. The interviewer is Michelle Kung. Google tells me she's a culture reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She seemed a genuine fan of the show, and geek cred to her for mentioning it being unofficial Star Wars Day.
I don't remember the first question, which had something to do with co-stars on TBBT, but Jim does this adorable bit when he mentions that Mayim Bialik's going to be appearing: "You know, tv's Blossom!" But I immediately sat up when the second question landed, because Michelle asks him about the possibilities of Sheldon's ever developing a romantic relationship! Whoa! Jim mentions the standard reasons for no, citing Sheldon's lack of interest and his notion that pursuing such a relationship would be a waste of his resources. But he leaves room for it to happen, saying that it could happen if Sheldon's "hit over the head" or "ambushed" with it. How many great TBBT fics are there where S/P happen just this way! He does go on to say that he doesn't think that will happen (sob), since, in his opinion, the writers on TBBT don't "do drastic change" and that "part of the joy in watching [characters like those on TBBT] is seeing their predictable reactions."
Michelle mentions that the rerun episode was the one where he's "playing in a ball court." Jim: "Ball court sounds so...dignified. It was definitely a ball pit." Heh. He goes on to say that the ball pit was an example of how expansive the show can be, because it has science as its basis, and science is about everything. He mentions, though not by name, the science consultant and how he's always presented with situations (like the ball pit) by the writers, and is then asked to come up with a scientific way to get the characters there. (Btw, David Salzman, the consultant, blogs about the science behind the episodes here.)
Michelle asks Jim about his favorite arcs this season, and offers up hers: the Evil Wil Wheaton appearances. After she says this, she can do no wrong in my eyes, as Jim goes on to talk about one of my favorite people in the BBT-verse. He calls EWW a "perfect foil" for Sheldon in evilness, but that "there's nothing to dislike as a person" about the real Wil. He adds that Wil's the "nicest celebrity you could ever meet," so, of course it makes sense that someone as nice as Wil turns out to be the one who captures all of Sheldon's negative attention. "No interest in love or desire to reproduce but Sheldon has time to relish being disappointed by a celebrity."
Michelle mentions that there's an instant Bazinga! button online. I start to get a feeling that I might be rating high on the Jim Parsons stalk-o-meter, since I bookmarked that website a long time ago. Jim makes a joke that he didn't know: "Well, I don't make any money off of it!" The audience laughs, but he quickly backtracks and calls it "charming." I sort of get that feeling again that he doesn't quite get how popular he's become that people would make things like this and put it up publicly!
They move into talking about how Jim wound up playing the role of Sheldon Cooper, and he says he was initially drawn to the character because he had a certain "rhythm of speech, a convoluted awkward way of making a point," which made it a hard audition to do. He doesn't remember feeling very connected to the story in the pilot, but he felt connected to the way Sheldon talked, so much so that he felt that he should have been in at least the top 5 contenders for the role after auditioning. Auditioning to be Sheldon Cooper also wasn't fated, as Jim shared the BBT pilot was probably "1 out of 20" pilots he'd auditioned for at that time.
They get ready to show a clip intro'd as one of JP's first tv roles. At first, I think it's going to be that "raised by wolves" Quiznos commercial, but I realize after the first few seconds, it's going to be that bit from Ed. The stalk-o-meter is rising alarmingly high. I think maybe I need to lay off searching Youtube for "Jim Parsons." I think Jim is probably the only one to still be surprised when his co-stars, in this case John Slattery via Julie Bowen, tell him he's "going to do things."
We get to a really nice section where Jim talks about acting, after Michelle asks him if he feels like he's now in a place where other actors come to him for advice. "Just keep doing it. It's about consistency in your effort. You're only going to learn as you do the work." We learn about his first movie role since TBBT started, the upcoming Big Year. The title is a bird-watching term for a year in which a watcher sees as many different species of bird possible. He quips, "I'm sure [the movie's] more interesting than that [fact]." He's going to play a bird-watching blogger. Going back to acting, he says that there's no road map for anybody to follow, citing that his way just happened to be doing local theater and getting loans to finance graduate studies in acting. " His practice now is to read scripts to find out "where's the guy to play?" and go from there.
Jim is asked about his view on the trajectory of Sheldon's growth, and he shares how the writers ask him if he can do all these different things, like play the recorder, or his favorite query, "do you know how to ride a unicycle?" He says he offered to learn, only to hear "don't offer!" advice from his co-workers. He's gotten off-tangent from the original question and asks, a little flustered, "What were you asking me again?" He does this a couple of times at different places throughout the interview, to the audience's laughter. He gets back on track by saying that he never has advice for the writers on Sheldon: "I don't want to step in the way of something wonderful to happen...The writers write things and I think, I would never have thought of that...My big idea is not to derail." When asked if there's anything too out-there for him to do as Sheldon, he responds, "What can you do on network tv? Nudity? I was naked in a play once. That's different...if not worse." Laughter and internal squeeing from me at that visual. He goes on to what's a pretty painful part of the interview for me, in which he praises Chuck Lorre for a lot of things I and other members of the fandom probably don't praise Chuck for: "Chuck has vision...There are probably a lot of shows out there that are run really well, but you can't run a show better than Chuck...He's created this safe environment, and won't let the actors stray too far from character, leaving us free to experiment."
Michelle turns it over to audience question time, and what do you know, they pick the guy sitting in the row right in front of me! So as I'm bobbling my camera, trying to hide it under my bag to take some surreptitious video, I get the full force of OMG JIM IS LOOKING RIGHT AT ME!!!!!!!! I seriously have to resist the urge to flip my hair, for goodness' sake. He's asked how he learns his lines since they're so full of science and geek jargon, and if he uses cues to do it (yawn, repeat question). When Jim says he memorizes his lines, no cues, the asker "wow"s into the mic. Jim mentions that the taping schedule of TBBT leaves him time over the weekend to devote to memorizing his lines. As for the jargon, he says that 30 years ago it would have been impossible for him to play a role with lines like Sheldon's because Wiki and Youtube weren't around. This is when he mentions that's how even though he would call himself pretty well-versed in Star Wars, he had to look up things like [sic] Colonel Ackbar's line, "It's a trap!" and how to do "WHEATONNNNNNNN" because he'd "never seen any of the Star Trek movies. Everyone let out a sort of muffled gasp, but I distinctly heard one lady literally squawk at that confession! I have to think Jim heard it too, because at that point, he looks abashed. I already knew that he'd never, because Wil Wheaton and Bill Prady tweeted about it, how Jim thought the writers were making up Vulcan mind-melding, resulting in Wil having to teach Jim, who'd never heard of it before filming "The Wheaton Occurrence," how to do a mind-meld with his bowling ball. He says the geeky stuff comes in handy for his crossword puzzles. He's learned that H.G. Well's "Eloi" comes up often as a clue answer, as well as "ken" as in "out of your ken," which is "something that Sheldon says, but I don't."
He's asked about his Comic-Con experience, and how he's come to find that TBBT has "the warmest, sweetest fans." Awwww. I still can't believe I wasn't into TBBT the year I went to CC and missed my chance to see it!
Question is what was your most interesting fan reaction? "Well, they're all interesting..." Laughter. "...In a good way!" I like to think we're a classy bunch of fans, so I'm hoping he's not being treated to a replay of some nutjob fan attack in his mind. He tells a story about walking in LA, which nobody does but Jim does, because he's "lived in New York and am a freak." Seriously, nobody walks in California. I didn't own my own car when I lived there for 3 years, and my neighbor was genuinely surprised when she found out I'd been walking the 3/4 mile trip to the local library and grocery store and gave me this look like, "You....walked....somewhere?" Anyway, Jim got honked at by a car driving by, which scared him at the time. He finds out through six degrees of Facebook that a fan wrote in an open apology that she had honked to try to get his attention. He jokingly asks the audience if that fan was in attendance. Hope somehow the news get back to them that Jim received their message!
Audience member: "You're a comic genius."
Jim: "Aww... it's my mother." Wasn't really, to the best of my knowledge, which made it funny.
Question is who are your idols, and with whom would you want to work? Jim shares that he loved sitcoms as a kid, and felt a big connection to Mork, even throwing a Mork-themed birthday party. He was into Robin Williams ("What the hell was that about?!") and Three's Company with John Ritter. I was struck again with how sad it is to live in a world without John Ritter, and how awesome he could have been on TBBT. I mean to look up his episodes of 8 Simple Rules soon. Jim also mentions being oddly entranced by The Mary Tyler Moore Show, despite not being able to understand it fully as a child: "It had a depth of emotion even in a scene set in the middle of comedy...It had structure, and a rhythm." I really like how he keeps coming back to this concept of rhythm. As a pianist, I often am able to "hear" things and in that way conceptualize and relate to them. He must do the something of the same. He lists Betty White as Meemaw and Lisa Kudrow as Penny's mom as his two people to work with, even going so far to pitch it to a higher-up CBS exec. He's quick to point out again that he has no say in casting and often doesn't know with whom he'll be working on any given episode until he reads the script.
Question is what are the best and worst parts of your job? The worst part is how he often just doesn't know what's going to happen, and he likens the anxiety he feels at that moment to maybe be his life source: "Maybe what keeps me going is what gives me gas." Best line of the night. He's so honest and it all comes out so humorously! The best part of his job is moments like when he recently took his nephew with him to tape a Sesame Street segment, and he got a little emotional and teary over it. As an aunt with an adorable nephew, I totally got why he would get choked up. Sweet, sweet moment.
We take a question tweet about whether or not we'll see more Sheldon/Raj friendship developing. Jim says that what he likes about the show is how there is "no un-fun pairing." This is where I snarked to myself, "except Leonard/Penny." Zing. Man, I feel bad about saying that but like Sheldon, "I never apologize for the truth!" Ha! Jim takes some time to gush about Kunal being such a gracious person and actor. Despite having to work without talking, he's such an "unbitching, positive energy person...maybe a little wild for my taste." Hee! Raj/Sheldon BFFs is one of my most favorite relationships.
Jim mentions how surreal it is to have celebrities watch the show because recently, the cast found out Whoopi had sent them cookies and a card. (I thought this was strange, since wouldn't Whoopi know that tapings are over this time of season? Shrug.) He jokes how he told Simon Helberg (Wolowitz) he didn't even know why Whoopi would watch the show in the first place, when Simon reminds him of Wolowitz's question to EWW about "hitting that," referring to when Wil and Whoopi worked together on Star Trek. I like that on-screen and off-screen, Jim seems to be genuine friends with his cast-members, though I think he mentions Kunal, Simon, and Kaley the most, and almost never Johnny...
Question is, Sheldon has a roommate agreement with Leonard. What would you put in your roommate agreement? Kind of a weird question for me, as it kind of makes it seem like Jim = Sheldon and therefore should have a roommate agreement, which is untrue and kind of offensive to the actor, imo. It's actually a "new" question so I am kind of surprised to find out that Jim was the "bad" roommate who didn't pay the rent on time and left the common area disorderly. He says that, unlike Sheldon, he wouldn't regulate the thermostat, but would probably choose to "fight about that on a day-to-day basis." Heh. And he says to look forward to the reason why the roommate agreement was drawn up in the first place appearing in the flashback episode to be aired, saying that it begins with "a bitchfest fight over the thermostat!"
[My notes start breaking down at this point because I'm trying to video at the same time.]
Sheldon is revealing himself in his own time, Jim says, and Jim is open to "the revelation of new material...or maybe I'm lazy."
When asked if he has any scientific background like his character, he rightly says, "Those kids on Grey's Anatomy aren't doctors."
Fans tell him all the time, "Oh, I'm just like Leonard!" or some other show character, but he's never met someone who'll admit they're like Sheldon. "It's always someone pointing to someone else and saying, 'THEY'RE just like Sheldon!"
Question, is what role would you like to play on Broadway? Jim shares that he'd love to partner with a writer and launch a new character/show, but as for existing roles, he likes darker comedies. Kind of like Six Feet Under, "charming, funny, creepy...that's right up my alley."
Interview ends, all too soon, and Jim is rushed out. I left effusive praise on a comment card, hoping that if enough people would do the same, they'd continue to have great events like this one. I took my time filling it out, supposing that since he posed for pictures and gave autographs at the beginning of the event, he wouldn't do so after. But walking out of the Paley, HE'S RIGHT THERE!! I'm caught up in the mad crush around him that's trying to get him to autograph stuff. I fished out my notebook, thinking maybe I could get him to autograph my notes for this post, but I'm not really an autograph hound, and I dislike the idea of thrusting something into an actor's face and getting all up in their business, so I didn't really try that hard. I do get pushed in by the crowd until I could reach out and touch him, yeahthatclose! And then he's off and away into a big, black, tinted-windowed car. All in all, I had an amazing time.
If anyone even gets this far in this long-winded post, you're amazing too. Gold star for you.