Tragic Details About The Cast Of Young Sheldon

The hit series "Young Sheldon" was destined for success before it even reached television. Serving as a prequel to "The Big Bang Theory," it highlights the early years of Sheldon Cooper. Actor Jim Parsons portrayed the character on "The Big Bang Theory" for its 12 seasons, airing from 2007 to 2019, and Iain Armitage was cast in the role on "Young Sheldon." The prequel quickly became one of the most-watched shows on CBS during its run.

las, "Young Sheldon" came to an end in 2024 after seven seasons. Its cancellation resonated with many, including the cast. Actor Annie Potts, who played Sheldon's grandmother, was particularly blindsided. As she told Variety, "This one was especially hard because I was completely unprepared. I was shocked. If a show is starting to drag or lag or have a lack of stories or whatever, then you kind of see it coming. We were totally ambushed by this. I was, anyway."

The series ended on a particularly heartbreaking note: In the final episodes, the characters grieved the loss of a beloved character. In real life, the stars of "Young Sheldon" are no strangers to tragedy, either.

"Young Sheldon" began when Iain Armitage was just 9 years old. Having spent so much of his life on the show, saying goodbye to the "Young Sheldon" world was particularly bittersweet for the young actor. As he said on "CBS Mornings," "It was harder than I thought it was going to be." The most difficult scene for him to film came during the show's final season.

In a 2024 interview with the  Los Angeles Times, Armitage shared how he was deterred from showing emotion while filming the scene when they found out George Sr. (Lancer Barber) had died. "For one of the takes, I tried to sink down the chair and not quite cry, but start to get emotional, and [writer] Steve Molaro very quickly was like, 'No, don't. Not even [a] second. It's almost more heartbreaking if we don't see any emotion on your face. You're completely lost,'" he said. 

Emily Osment, who played Georgie's first wife on "Young Sheldon," has been in the industry for a long time. The younger sister of actor Haley Joel Osment, Emily's breakout role was on "Hannah Montana," and while it was a boon for her career, it wasn't exactly easy growing up in the limelight. Her brother also recognized how difficult this period was for her. As he told The Guardian. "She had to deal with a lot more strange invasions of privacy, not being able to have a normal school life, and what exacerbated all of that was she had to be on social media." 

Years later, the Los Angeles native experienced an unthinkable tragedy. In January 2025, both her brother and her parents lost their homes in the Eaton Wildfire. She announced the news with an Instagram post towards the end of the month, expressing her heartache but lending a message of encouragement. "So much love for my beautiful, aching city," she wrote, adding, "We will rebuild. We are so strong, even stronger than we could ever imagine."

On "Young Sheldon," Zoe Perry played the devout and stressed-out matriarch of the Cooper family, Mary. Playing such a tightly wound character, at times, could actually be physically taxing — and the actor didn't exactly love this. As Perry told Mashable in October 2019, "Least favorite is probably her rigidity because it is not only metaphorical but literal! I find that I am constantly tense when I am playing her. So at the end of the day, I'm a little sore!"

This wasn't the only source of pressure for Perry. After all, the older version of her character that appeared in "The Big Bang Theory" was played by none other than Perry's own mother, Laurie Metcalf. Though she was literally born to play the role, Perry still had to audition — but she knew how people would look at it from the nepotism angle. "I don't think there's any way to negate that because why would you?" she said to The Hollywood Reporter in December 2017. "We have lots of similarities when it comes to our voices and mannerisms, and I'm lucky that I have that at my disposal — not only for this part, but in general."

Just before her career took off and she transformed into the superstar we know today, Annie Potts, who played Sheldon's spirited Meemaw, was in a car crash that nearly broke every bone below the waist. At the time of the accident, Potts, who was 21 years old, was a budding actor in theater school. She had imagined a career dancing and acting, but overnight, the life she once knew became unrecognizable. She had to face the possibility of never being able to walk, let alone dance.

During an interview with The Guardian in March 2024, Potts detailed the accident. She explained that  drunk teenagers were drag racing the wrong way down a highway when they got in a head-on collision. "It took a very long time to recover. I'm still trying to recover," she candidly revealed. As of 2024, she's had over 20 operations since the accident. Though the crash had a profound, lasting impact on Potts, she shared that she learned a lot about life and a lot about persistence when she was staring death in the face, and that's a lesson she'll keep forever.

"Young Sheldon" actor Raegan Revord was also involved in a horrible car crash. Revord, who began playing Missy Cooper when she was 9 years old, got into an accident on the way to set one day. The incident left her shaken for a long time.

In an April 2023 interview with People, Revord recounted the fateful morning her car was T-boned by a drunk driver. "It was that metal on metal and then the airbags going out, all of it just together, that sound sticks with you," she said. "Every time you drive past there, you're holding your breath ... you just relive what happened every time you pass it." She also noted that driving around in general could be challenging. "I still have panic attacks sometimes, having to get in the car or [when] someone else who's driving hits their brakes quickly," she said. 

When the Season 6 episode "A Stolen Truck and Going on the Lam" aired in March 2023, Revord took to Instagram to share that the car-heavy episode wasn't easy to film. However, the cast and crew of "Young Sheldon" looked out for her. "They checked in with me along the way and never made me feel like finishing filming was a priority, that my well being came first," she said

Mckenna Grace, who played Paige on "Young Sheldon," has a side that she didn't let out for a long time. However, that all changed when she began releasing music that opened up about her struggles with social anxiety in a very public way. 

As the title suggests, Grace's song "do all my friends hate me?" digs into her very real fears and insecurities. "[It's] a song I wrote when I was feeling just that...that all my friends hated me," she told The Jed Foundation, which is a nonprofit focused on the mental and emotional health of teens. 

Though she's a naturally positive person, she does struggle with opening up and seeking support when she needs it. "I had all these feelings of being annoying and really not liking myself," she said in her aforementioned interview with The Jed Foundation. Like many people, she struggled with self-worth and relying on other people's approval for identity. Though she was reluctant to put her feelings in her music, it was not only cathartic but allowed her to connect with others. As she said in a 2022 chat with The Honey Pop, "It's total therapy and I just put it all out there."

Jim Parsons joined the "Young Sheldon" cast as a narrator but didn't appear in front of the camera until the finale. Before that, he, of course, played the older version of Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory" for 12 seasons. When the Emmy-winning actor was ready to step away from the series, a number of personal and professional reasons came into play.

When he decided to move on — a decision that played a major role in the cancellation of "The Big Bang Theory" — Parsons was only a few years younger than his dad was when he passed.Jim's father was 52 years old when he died in a car accident; Parsons was 46 when Season 12 ended. The Emmy-winning actor took this as a sign that he needed to venture out. As he recalled on a 2020 episode of "David Tennant Does a Podcast With...," "I said, 'If you told me that like my father I had six years left to live, I think there's other things I need to try and do. I don't know what they are, but I can tell that I need to try.'" 

Around that time, Parson's 14-year-old dog passed away. The grief hit him hard, and it played into his decision to leave the show. "It really upset me. Still does," he said. 

Ed Begley Jr., the actor who played Sheldon's college professor Dr. Grant Linkletter, has gone through a lot in his life. At 16, he discovered his family friend named Sandy was his biological mother, and he and his sister were the result of an affair his Oscar-winning father had tried to bury. What's more, the mother who he grew up with — his stepmother — died when he was just 7 years old.The revelation about his biological mother shattered the actor's world. He felt cheated and deceived, and he began misusing alcohol and pills. "Nearly everyone in my family suffered from alcoholism," he told The Wall Street Journal.

In 1970, the "Young Sheldon" actor's family was turned upside-down again when his father, Ed Begley Sr., died of a heart attack. Over the next several years, things only continued to go south for Ed Jr. Afer his father's death, he not only stabbed in a random attack, but hit by a car. "All this had Biblical proportions," he told Rolling Stone. "There are no accidents. I obviously wanted to live in turmoil, so I lived in turmoil. I know this now because none of these things happen to me anymore." Begley Jr. has been sober since 1979.

Mayim Bialik, who joined Jim Parsons for a surprise reunion in the "Young Sheldon" series finale as Sheldon's wife, has used her platform to advocate for mental health issues, some of which she has dealt with throughout her own life. "I started experiencing more proper depression, I'd say in middle school," she shared on "Really Famous with Kara Mayer Robinson." "I'm a person with OCD, I fall on the mild-moderate ... I didn't know that's what it was." She's been candid about some of the challenges she's faced over the years. "One of the things that made my life really difficult was trying new things, and it's still really hard for me," she said in a video for the Child Mind Institute. "But what I've found that with trusting other people ... you can make changes and still be okay."

In her aforementioned conversation with Kara Mayer Robinson, Bialik shared that she didn't start seeing a therapist until high school and got into what she called the "right" therapy a few years later. 

The late Bob Newhart played Sheldon's favorite celebrity, Professor Proton, in "The Big Bang Theory" universe. Newhart passed away on July 18, 2024, at age 94. Three months before then, he had lost his wife, Ginnie Quinn Newhart, and three months before that, they had celebrated the 60th anniversary of their first outing, which was a blind date set up by a mutual friend, Buddy Hackett. 

Bob and Ginnie tied the knot in 1963. "The marriage of comedians, no matter how stormy, seems to last a long time, and I attribute it to laughter," Bob told Parade in 2022. "No matter how intense the argument you're having, you can find a line, and then you both look at each other and start laughing." Ginnie has been his supporter and best friend, and when he lost her in January 2023, the comedian took to X to mourn his loss: "She was our rock and we miss her terribly." A friend told Radar Online that Bob had been racked with grief in his last days. 

Before joining the "Young Sheldon" cast as Dr. Carol Lee, an experimental physicist at East Texas Tech University, Ming-Na Wen was already a part of gigantic franchises, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. She also famously lent her voice to the Disney movie "Mulan." However, before Hollywood stardom, the actor faced many struggles as a second-generation Chinese American immigrant. Born in Macao, she moved to the United States with her family when she was 5 years old. Throughout her childhood, she struggled with her sense of belonging. "Growing up as an Asian American in this society, there were a lot of times where you feel isolated or out of place as an Asian," she told China Central Television (via NBC News). "And growing up in White America that's absolutely my experience." She got into acting so that she could be someone else. "I wanted to be anybody else but Asian," she said.

Wen, unfortunately, grew used to people mispronouncing her name, and she was even advised to anglicize her name early on in her career. "Living in America with a name like mine, trust me, it wasn't easy — in fact, it sucked," she shared at her Hollywood Walk of Fame star ceremony, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. "I hope my star will help all the Americans out there, or anyone else, that they don't have to be a 'Tom,' 'John' or 'Mary' to feel American — they do belong." She also thanked her mother for her name.

Wallace Shawn, who played Dr. John Sturgis in "Young Sheldon," told Katie Harper that he went through a "crisis" when he was well into adulthood. At age 40, he began to question America's role in international affairs. He also began to question his own role. "I wasn't in the audience, I was in the drama," he told Jacobin. "And I was one of the beneficiaries of what I already knew to be imperial behavior on the part of my country. ... I felt a loathing for myself as someone responsible for the suffering of humanity."

In the 1980s, during the Nicaraguan Revolution, Shawn spent an extensive amount of time in Central America. Having a front-row seat to this uprising shaped him significantly. As he told Harvard Magazine, "At a certain point, I was able to face the fact that, Wow, it was the U.S. Army who did that, and a) it was my taxes that paid for them to do it; and b) they did it to preserve the status quo in which I am leading a very pleasant life." He also was ashamed of how long it took him to reach this point. "These things are happening every day because of me and my friends, and we're not doing anything about it," he said. "You have murder and torture going on–so, what does that make us?" Shawn's inner turmoil inspired in his autobiographical play, "The Fever."

Craig T. Nelson, who played Dale in "Young Sheldon," has been through a lot. He has struggled with his mental health and alcoholism, and in his younger years, he grappled with his own temper. "My default as a young man was always rage," he told Men's Journal. "I could hold on to it for a while." He later understood the root of his rage was fear. "I had to figure out why there was so much fear in my life," he said.

Early in his career, Nelson felt unmoored in both his personal life and professional life. So, he decided to head out to the woods and live there until he was ready to get back to Tinseltown and begin his recovery journey. As he told Success, sobriety is a "a lifelong addendum that I needed in order to survive, a process I utilize on a daily basis. Bottom line, I sought another path, and it's not easy. But it's the best one there is."

As it turns out, a silver screen legend played a key role in his new path. As Nelson shared with Parade, his time making 1980's "Stir Crazy," which was directed by Sidney Poitier, changed his life for the better. "If Sidney Poitier hadn't been there, I would have had a different turn," Nelson said. "He reminded me of my humanity and what he expected out of me."

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.