When: 8:30 p.m. Mondays
Where: CBS/Channel 112009 EMMY AWARDS
When: 7 tonight
Where: CBS/Channel 11
BURBANK, CALIF. - The cameras aren't rolling on the set of TV's The Big Bang Theory. Actor Jim Parsons sits on a couch, in his character Sheldon Cooper's spot, lost in thought.
This day has entailed mostly rehearsals and camera set-ups for the season's third episode. The pace has been impressive: a bar scene, followed by a kitchen scene, followed by a couch scene as the production moves from one set to another. Big Bang's apartment building on the Warner Bros. lot seems Picasso-esque, with the cubed sets lined up one next to another rather than laid out as they'd be in a real structure. Parsons is thinking over a tweak to the script just suggested by series creator Chuck Lorre.
The show begins its third season with reason for enthusiasm. A few years after some thought the traditional sitcom was dying, The Big Bang Theory shows great promise. Its audience has grown over the past two years, and CBS has ordered not just a third but also a fourth season. The show now occupies a desirable time slot after hit comedy Two and a Half Men. And Parsons is also nominated for best comedy actor at tonight's Emmy show.
Parsons is part of a lovable ensemble that gives life to intriguing characters in a simple premise. He plays Sheldon Cooper, a physicist. He and his physicist roommate Leonard (Johnny Galecki) have a nerdy social circle that includes another physicist and an engineer. Comfort zones are nudged to different degrees when they become friends with Sheldon and Leonard's neighbor Penny, a waitress played by Kaley Cuoco.
Veteran director Mark Cendrowski keeps a loose set on Big Bang. Each scene is assigned a letter. When a scene is called for set up, crew members play a little game, shouting out 1980s music acts that start with that letter.
Scene A is called. ABBA is the first name shouted and gets a tepid response. Somebody tries Adam Ant and gets cheers. Cuoco tries Aerosmith, a sweet, funny choice in line with the fact she was born in 1985. Boos ensue from crew members who remember the '70s.
Amid the play, Parsons is figuring out some of the complex rhythms required of his character, who must rattle off line after line of tightly composed, rhythmic dialogue, and then do something with his face or body during the silence that follows. The night after these rehearsals, those silences will be filled with laughter from a studio audience.
"When he listens he's in character, when he walks he's in character, when he sits down he's in character," Lorre says. "It involves a great deal of thought. And his instincts are uncanny. You can't teach that. It's wonderful to be near it and watch it."
Later, when asked if he thinks acting was an inevitable thing for him to do, Parsons immediately answers, "Yes." He pauses a moment, as Sheldon might, but rather than waiting for laughter, he's composing a story. Parsons speaks fluidly like somebody who spends his time studying words, without fractured sentences.
He tells about how his mother kept a little scrapbook that listed things like his favorite colors and what he wanted to do when he grew up. "From a very early age, I said ‘movie star,'" he says. "I couldn't have known what that meant, as far as fame - that didn't make sense to me. But I knew I wanted to act. There were brief bleeps like teacher and meteorologist, but (acting) was there from day one. Why? I have no idea. I was given plenty of attention as a child."
Parsons, 36, knew the role of Sheldon was a bazinga moment. He was living in New York, having established a strong theater background in Houston, where he was a founding member of the Infernal Bridegroom theater company as well as a Stages Repertory Theatre regular. In New York he found theater work and spot roles on TV, though the process was sometimes disappointing for the little-known actor: He'd audition for 15 to 30 pilots per season. Sometimes he'd not get the role, sometimes he would, then the show wouldn't get picked up.
Parsons was instantly drawn to the rhythms of Sheldon's speech. "I felt very strongly about the structure of it and the way they laid out the character and the way he talked," he says. "It was a one-in-a-million match."
Parsons' and Sheldon's pitch and cadences overlap a bit, but it's clear Parsons is embodying a character. That said, his transformation looks effortless. He chews up the bigger words and longer sentences, nearly singing them as Sheldon. But a physical aspect to his work suggests silent film stars like Buster Keaton. He does several takes of a slightly sinister Pavlovian scene involving Cuoco's character and chocolate. Each time he gently manipulates his slowly spreading Grinch-like grin to different effect.
Jason Nodler, the artistic director for Houston's The Catastrophic Theatre, was, like Parsons, a founding member of Infernal Bridegroom. Nodler, a fan of Big Bang Theory, says, "I recognize every move Jim makes on that show. It's just a natural part of his physical vocabulary. He's a naturally gifted physical comedian."
The show has five strong characters at its center, and their interaction is crucial to its success. But Parsons' work earned him the Emmy nomination.
He's quick to deflect credit. Of the physical aspect of his character, he says it was there from the pilot episode, when Penny sits in his spot on the couch. "It's like when he's searching for his seat, some of his lines will be his movement."
As for the chewy dialogue, he says, "I love having to ferret out that rhythm that's within there. But I wouldn't pat myself on the back too hard, the writers make it very evident.
"But it was really a thing that moved me, more than the story, when I read the pilot."
P arsons thinks his Houston background - the breadth and pace of his work here - is integral in his success.
It started poorly. After graduating from Klein Oak High School, Parsons attended University of Houston, where a classmate urged him to audition for a production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Parsons was deeply intrigued by the material, but says he wasn't quite comfortable with the work. He missed a few rehearsals and had a meeting with the director. "I just wasn't at peace with it," he says. "And it's no picnic putting Endgame on. It's a great joy, but also a little rough-edged."
Once the production was complete, though, he threw himself into acting, doing 17 plays in three years, everything from works by Bertolt Brecht to Guys and Dolls.
He recalls doing children's theater during the day, rehearsing during the afternoons and doing plays like Georg Büchner's murderous 19th-century play Woyzeck at night.
"I didn't have a life," he says. "I thought I did.
"But I had those opportunities at IBP and U of H. Houston was a great environment. Texas is a funny place in general. It's not even like two sides of a coin, it's more like a hexagonal Dungeons and Dragons die. People make a lot of assumptions about it, but it was fulfilling and nurturing to work there.
"There's no learning like the doing. 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. On one level, it made it hard to throw me. I've done it. I guess I haven't performed on a sinking Titanic ... but I'm young yet."
Nodler says much of the work they did together at IBP was "awfully dark."
"But there was always some comic element. Jim always did a beautiful job. Even when something was dark, he was always funny. He can't help but be funny."
Parsons left Houston in 1999, though he still gets back often to see friends and family. He attended grad school in San Diego and eventually moved to New York, where he quickly found work off Broadway.
There were small TV parts and also a well-known Quiznos commercial where - when asked if he were raised by wolves - he was nuzzling and suckling with some wolf pups.
Then came Sheldon.
Lorre knew Parsons understood the character on his first audition. "We knew we were witnessing something astonishing," he says. Lorre was so impressed he asked Parsons to return to make sure his audition wasn't a fluke.
"He's a force of nature. He really is that good."
Acting can be an art, but, not surprisingly for a guy who plays a physicist, Parsons sees the math in it.
"Muddied comedy isn't comedy," he says. "Well, that may not be true for all comedy, but overall I feel there's this tremendous amount of precise work that goes into lining all the pieces so you can have what appears to be the chaos of it. To put it in the basest terms, you can't really fall down. You have to plan for it."
On the surface, Big Bang Theory is a traditional sitcom. It has multiple cameras. It's written with breaks for the audience's laughter.
But it's a different traditional sitcom, which has likely endeared it to its viewers. The science squad possesses greater numerical aptitude than your average viewer, but their interactions - immediate and their code-like subtexts - all ring true, like a geeky variation of Rock Paper Scissors that includes lizards and Spock (who gets disproved by paper).
Sometimes Sheldon's jokes are full of heady language written with rhythm and purpose.
"I'm a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know," Penny says in one episode.
"Yes," Sheldon replies. "It tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality."
Other times the lines are more efficient. When he asks what to order in a restaurant he gets a cliche in response. Everything's good. "Statistically unlikely," he quips.
Parsons points out that when studying theater, people are taught that theatrical events come about from ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
"This is the reverse," he says. "It's putting extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances."
Penny is a portal and also an agitator. Her interactions with Leonard feel familiar to anyone involved in a sort of young urban tribe. Outside relationships threaten its fabric.
Over two seasons the show courted a growing audience with its characters.
Parsons, in particular, has drawn much attention. Last month he won a comedy award from the Television Critics Association, which also honored the show. At tonight's Emmys, Parsons and Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement are the newcomers in a best-actor field that includes Alec Baldwin, Tony Shalhoub, Steve Carell and Charlie Sheen.
Parsons talks about it with Sheldon's jittery manner, only the mix of excitement, restraint and wonder isn't in tune with his character's numerical precision.
"I still feel this certain sensation that it's happening to somebody else," he says. "But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't exciting. I'm already nervous about being there, which is goofy; there's not much expected of me. I just walk in and sit down. But there's no script available. Just to go there and be there."
He pauses a beat as Sheldon might.
"My mother was excited."
andrew.dansby@chron.com