Being cast as Young Sheldon‘s Mary Cooper was not the first time that Zoe Perry had been tapped to play a younger version of a role originated by her mother. As a kid, she appeared as pint-sized Jackie Harris on ABC’s Roseanne.
Yet when she auditioned as an adult to succeed Metcalf in the Big Bang Theory universe, she found herself of two minds. “I had such a privileged position going into that audition, and was so honored that I was offered the opportunity to audition,” Perry tells TVLine. “I probably was a little nervous just in the way of comparisons.
“You know, my mom is not known as a hack,” she says with a laugh. “She’s a very well-respected actor. Also, even though she would only pop in and out, [Mary] had become kind of beloved on [Big Bang], so I definitely felt like there were some big shoes to fill.”
Perry’s TV husband, Lance Barber, found himself in a very different position. He would originate the role of George Sr., who had already been dead for more than a decade in Big Bang’s timeline when it premiered in 2007. For the next 10 seasons, we heard stories about the Cooper family patriarch — some not-so-great stories — but for all intents and purposes, this was a new character created for Young Sheldon.
“I knew that he was described as a redneck Homer Simpson,” Barber, who previously appeared on Big Bang not as George, but as Leonard’s high school bully Jimmy Speckerman, says in the video above. “The jokes were kind of big, and so there was the challenge of grounding this person and making him a human being, as opposed to a punchline.”
Perry and Barber quickly eased into their roles — their real-life friendship, as evidenced in our multi-part Q&A, most certainly helped — and they would spend the next seven seasons as Mom and Dad to Sheldon (Iain Armitage), Missy (Raegan Revord) and Georgie (Montana Jordan).
In Part 1 of our discussion, the pair delve further into their start on CBS‘ Big Bang spinoff — which has four episodes remaining, airing Thursday, May 9 and 16, at 8/7c — and reminisce about some of their favorite moments with their TV kids.
