Young Sheldon Fans Think Paige Has Had The Biggest Impact On Sheldon
McKenna Grace, who plays Paige on "Young Sheldon," is delighted to be a young actor. "It's funny, because now I've been acting 10 years professionally and I'm only 15," she explains in an interview with Collider. "So that's a weird thing to say. But I've been acting since I was five and a lot of people are like 'Aw, that poor girl, all she does is work! She needs to go outside! Ride a bike!' It's like those, to me, are the stupidest comments, because I have so much fun. ... I'm literally like outside skating, doing all sorts of stuff. That's just a lot of parts of my life I don't share on social media so it's hard to see behind the curtain. But honestly, this is what I love doing. This is my passion. I would not rather be doing anything else besides this."
In fact, Grace paints a pretty sunny picture of the making of "Young Sheldon." In a segment for ET where Grace and Iain Armitage interview each other, Armitage asked Grace what it was like to guest star on the show and she had nothing but positive comments. "Everyone's really fun and relaxed," Grace told Armitage, to which Armitage joked that he was now going to have to stress out about making sure to be relaxed.
Grace's character does seem to be a fan favorite, and fans have a lot to say about the friend or enemy in the show that has had the most influence on Sheldon: it's Paige.
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In a post on the r/YoungSheldon subreddit, u/HotCreamx asked "Which friend/enemy do you think had the most impact on Sheldon?" Not only did Paige win the poll, she won it by a landslide, garnering 228 votes with the next highest number being Tam with only 94. "Paige thought (sic) Sheldon how to understand people better and she even made him more empathetic towards her, you can even tell how he cares about her." wrote u/cookiesanddonutl.
Due to the impact she has on Sheldon, some fans are still trying to figure out why Sheldon never mentioned her in his entire time on "The Big Bang Theory." If she's that important, why the omission? There are a few theories. In the r/YoungSheldon subreddit, u/Bison_and_Waffles posed the theory that Paige is going to die at some point, leading Sheldon to not be able to talk about her as an adult. Ana Dumaraog over at ScreenRant has a theory that, somewhere between now and the beginning of "The Big Bang Theory," something happens with Paige that causes Sheldon to become the broken man he is when he first meets Leonard on the show. It's possible that both of those theories are true and that something tragic will happen to Paige that causes Sheldon to mostly forsake human relationships in the future... but for now, fans will just have to watch and find out.