Why McKenna Grace Thinks She Didn’t Return to Young Sheldon
Mckenna Grace opened up about why she thinks she wasn’t asked to return to Young Sheldon following offscreen “conflict.”
“On one of my last episodes, I was about to start on a film that was gonna shoot for, like, two months, and it ended up being this huge ordeal that I was gonna miss one day of work for Young Sheldon,” Grace, 20, recalled in Jessica Radloff‘s new book, Young Sheldon: The (Juicier-Than-Meemaw’s-Brisket) Inside Story of the Hit Comedy.
Grace, who played Paige on the CBS series, had to “pull out” of the film.
“I was never really back [on the show] after that. I’ve never talked about this, but I always think maybe that was why it was my last episode,” she noted. “Just because there was conflict with it. I don’t think there was ever any bad blood.”
The actress called it a “very complicated situation,” adding, “I always wonder if that was why. I really enjoyed my time working on Young Sheldon, and I had this one annoyingly complicated situation that I think resulted, possibly, in me not coming back [for future episodes]. I always did what I could schedule wise to make Young Sheldon work, but it’s always hard with those things and when teams [are involved].”
Showrunner Steve Holland, meanwhile, had his own perspective on the situation.
“There was a scheduling complication on Mckenna’s last episode. Her agents tried to book her [for] a movie the same week she was supposed to be shooting with us,” he explained in the book. “Unfortunately it wasn’t just missing one day of production, it would have meant her missing our entire episode. We even reached out to the other production to see if we could work it out so she could [do] both, but unfortunately, their dates were immovable.”
He continued: “So things did get a little messy. There were some heated phone calls with agents, but that has nothing to do with Mckenna; that’s just the business part of the business. But the fact that she was becoming such an in-demand actress did make her availability an issue in our final season.”
The Big Bang Theory, which aired from 2007 to 2019, starred Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch as a group of scientists and their significant others.
The CBS comedy won 10 Emmy Awards and spawned the prequel series, Young Sheldon. The spinoff introduced Us to Sheldon’s (Iain Armitage) brother Georgie (Montana Jordan), whose love story with Mandy (Emily Osment) set the scene for another CBS show, Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage.
Since Young Sheldon ended in 2024, fans have wondered whether Paige’s disappearance meant she died before the events of The Big Bang Theory.
“I have not heard these rumors! I do not think Paige is dead by any means,” Grace said in the book. “Paige is not dead. I like to think she is happy, eventually. Maybe she’s out there somewhere doing something cool now, whether it’s working in science or math. Or maybe she has a little random job and is doing something creative.”
Grace wished she knew more about where her character was now.
“I wish I could have seen where she ended up, or what her difficult times taught her because I think she’s such an intelligent young woman. I’d love to see what she’s doing now,” she shared. “I loved playing Paige. It’s the weirdest thing, especially whenever you’ve been on a show since you were a kid.”
She concluded: “I wished I could have come back for the last season. That’s always something I get asked. Because I would have. I would have been there, for sure.”
Young Sheldon: The (Juicier-Than-Meemaw’s-Brisket) Inside Story of the Hit Comedy is out now.
