‘Big Bang Theory’ Alum Jim Parsons Says Fame Came at a Price: ‘I Made Myself Miserable’

Jim Parsons won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for playing Dr. Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, which ran from 2007 to 2019. Now he is opening up about the hidden toll of his career peak, admitting that the same drive that built his stardom also left him deeply unhappy.

Parsons, 53, said that during some of his biggest professional wins, he was privately struggling. “I look back now and realize that there were many ways, at some of the best moments of my life, I was miserable,” he said on the Monday, July 13 episode of the All Out with Jon Dean podcast. “I was not happy. I was stressed.”

He went on to describe feeling weighed down by self-imposed expectations. “I felt that there was so many plates I was supposed to be keeping in the air and that the success and the good things of life that were happening were only due to this overworking … discipline and whatever,” he said on the podcast. “And maybe to a degree that was true. I don’t know.”

Even so, Parsons made clear he wouldn’t repeat that period of his life. “I wouldn’t do that again and for any amount of money … just because it was stressful and miserable at times. I made myself miserable,” he said.

When host Jon Dean asked whether that stemmed “from your own work ethic,” Parsons pushed back on the label. “If you want to call it that,” he said. “It translated in part into a work ethic, but it was really just obsessive behavior basically.”

On the podcast, Parsons said his perfectionism functioned more like a compulsion than ambition. “Yes, I was disciplined. Yes, I had a good work ethic, but a lot of it was because it was kind of OCD in nature,” he explained. “I had a list of things basically in my head that I had to get done in order to be comfortable and know that I could do my job right, which I don’t think was true.”

Looking back, Parsons isn’t sure a different approach was possible. He told Dean: “In the same way, I can’t go back. I don’t know that I would be where I — well, I wouldn’t be where I am right now if I hadn’t had that time of life. And the somewhat self-tortured nature of it was part of it. So, I don’t know what to tell people. … Like, I don’t know how much of that is necessary.”