Danielle Pinnock Talks ‘Young Sheldon’ and ‘Body/Courage’ [Exclusive Interview]

It can’t be comfortable to be on the receiving end of the extremely bright Sheldon Cooper’s corrections.

The prequel series Young Sheldon, which wraps up its first season on May 10th, shows us just how uncomfortable it is to be corrected by the boy genius.

I recently spoke with Danielle Pinnock, who plays Ms. Ingram, about her role on Young Sheldon and a documentary play that’s been close to her heart for many years.

The news surrounding Young Sheldon was so secretive that Pinnock didn’t know what she was auditioning for when she originally got the script for her audition.

“It was a same-day audition, my manager, Frank Gonzalaz called me at around 9:00am and said ‘Okay, I just got this part down for a character on this untitled show, can you be at CBS in three hours?'” Pinnock recalled.

“It was in the middle of pilot season, and I wanted to go out for everything I received, so I said, ‘You know what, Frank, I’ll be there.'”

“They actually had me read for the character that I was originally told to prepare, but then when they saw me they said, ‘We just wrote this new character called Ms. Ingram, can you read for her as well?'” said Pinnock. “I read for her, and literally, five hours later, I found out I was cast.”

Even though she’d been cast in the role, Pinnock didn’t know exactly what she was working on until the next day when she got to the table reading and saw Chuck Lorre, Jim Parsons from The Big Bang Theory, a lot of The Big Bang Theory writers, John Favreau who was directing the pilot episode, and Ian Armitage that things started to click. Then she was told that the role was for Young Sheldon.

“I had absolutely no idea. I was excited to just be booked on something during pilot season, and the script was very funny, and I loved the role. But I had absolutely no clue what was happening because it was so secretive.” 

Ms. Ingram is the math teacher at Medford High School in east Texas, a subject that young Sheldon Cooper excels in. The dynamic informs how Pinnock portrays her character. 

“She is very tightly wound,” said Pinnock with a laugh.

“I definitely think that Ms. Ingram has a lot of anxiety when she’s being corrected by Sheldon Cooper. He’s always correct when her math is off, and he lets everyone know that in front of the class, and she’s always frequently embarrassed by that. It’s been such a ball playing her. She’s so fun and so quirky,” said Pinnock. “I just love her.” 

Ms. Ingram was a recurring character in Season 1, but Pinnock is excited for the potential the character may have to return in the future. 

“In Season 1 they alluded to a potential relationship that she had with another teacher, so I’m excited to explore who that was or is and where she lives, and all that stuff,” she said. 

Pinnock was reluctant to start acting but is ultimately happy that she did.

“My first play was in 6th grade, and it was actually forced upon all of the sixth graders. I did not want to do the play at all because I was so super shy and so nervous, but I had to do the production,” Pinnock remembered.

Pinnock played Jafar’s evil sister in Aladdin and the Wonderful Magical Lamp. Since the show was a musical, her family discovered that she had a good singing voice.

“My mom, she was a single mom, and I think that once she found out that I could sing, she was like, ‘Hmmm, after-school activity,'” joked Pinnock.

Pinnock then decided that acting would be her major in college. She went on to the Birmingham School of Acting, which is now called the Royal Conservatory of Birmingham. During this time, the seeds were planted for her one-woman documentary play Body/Courage.

Body/Courage is a documentary play about body image. Pinnock has collected over 300 stories from people sharing their personal experiences with their bodies and has developed them into a 90-minute show that showcases some selected interviews with scenes from her own story.  

“We were asked to do a performance about something that we cared a lot about,” Pinnock explained. “I really wanted to focus on body image at that time because it was at the very, very beginning of the body positivity movement. We were seeing women on social media specifically trying to get others to love their bodies and sharing their stories about body positivity.”

The original play was her dissertation and consisted of five interviews including a young woman who’d had her freckles removed, a burn survivor, a plus-sized actress who had just been accepted into an MFA program in San Francisco, and a trans doctor. 

After a successful performance at school, Pinnock toured the production in New York. Then she and her husband moved to Chicago where she decided to continue workshopping the play. The play found a home at the Rivendale Theater where the play won a TimeOut Theatre Award in 2016.

“It was beyond anything that I could have imagined,” said Pinnock. “Cut to like six years later and I’ve interviewed 300 people for this project.”

“The great thing about the production, specifically for me, is when the people that I interviewed would come see themselves, me portraying them,” Pinnock reflected. “They would bring their families, and it was a little bit scary because I was like ‘Oh my gosh, I have to make sure that I’m doing their dialect right, their physicality.'”

Developing Body/Courage required Pinnock to do a lot of interviews, and when the project started, the technology to record interviews wasn’t as widely accessible as it is today.

“When I first started the project, it was in 2011,” Pinnock stated. “So, I didn’t have access to an iPhone at that point. I still had my flip phone, and I was in England at the time so they didn’t have Best Buy or anything like that. So, I had to order, on Amazon, this voice recorder, and it was horrible! The quality was so bad.”

But her access to technology did improve with time and she was able to ditch the voice recorder for an iPhone first, and then an Apple laptop.

In addition to conducting the interviews that would become Body/Courage, Pinnock worked with a dialect coach and a personal trainer to help her embody each persona she’d be taking on. 

There are several stories from Body/Courage that Pinnock feels close to. One of the hardest ones for her to perform is the story of a young woman who survived a burn that resulted from a domestic violence situation, when her partner burned her with french fry oil.

“It’s one of the hardest interviews for me to perform, because for myself as an artist, it’s very emotional, but when she was telling it, she wasn’t emotional at all. It was just kind of: ‘These are the facts. This is what happened.’ She was also very far removed from it.” Pinnock explained.

The interview was especially difficult when she went into the different methods she used to regain the use of her leg, but Pinnock finds the story inspiring because of this woman’s strength.

“After she had lived with it for so long, she just said, ‘You know what, this is what my leg is going to look like for the rest of my life, I might as well just start getting to love myself, all of myself,” said Pinnock. “The part of the story that I love is when she went swimming for the first time because she loved swimming.”

Body/Courage has also evolved over time to include men’s stories. The first story that Pinnock included in the show was about a young man from Mumbai who wanted to train for the Olympics.

“His school was like four hours away from where he lived, and they didn’t have a car, so he would bike there and then bike home, so it was an eight-hour journey of trying to get there to train,” said Pinnock.

But this young man’s efforts didn’t have the happy ending he was hoping for when it came to the tryouts to make the Olympic team for India.

“He missed something by, it was like, 0.3 points and the couch could have easily just said, ‘You know what, it’s fine. You made it. You made the team you’ve been working so hard.’ And the coach did not let him on the team. So after all these years of work, he’d been working for seven, eight years just on his body, on his craft, his coach just did not allow him to go,” explained Pinnock.

After conducting that interview, Pinnock decided that she needed to interview more men for the production because it’s not as talked about in their community.

“I know that they’re going through things with body image as well,” said Pinnock.

In its current state, Body/Courage includes 14 interviews interspersed with Pinnock’s personal story. Pinnock doesn’t just embody each of the interview subjects, but also her mom and grandmother.

Playing her grandmother was a particularly special moment. Her grandmother had recently had a stroke and had lost the ability to speak, but Pinnock was able to give her new life on stage.

“My grandma was a huge gym rat,” said Pinnock. “She loved the gym and she had this incredible at home basement gym where she would frequently do taboo, core abs, and the bike, so we set up the whole gym for her on stage.”

In addition to acting, Pinnock is currently writing an essay for Shondaland.com, and a podcast called Shook coming out this summer dealing with the entertainment industry and mental health. She and her friend, LaNisa Fredrick, have also started a project called @hashtagbooked on Instagram where they do improvised scenes based on the acting business.

She’s also catching up on some television shows.

“I know I am like years behind, but I just started Homeland,” said Pinnock. “When I tell you I just started, I just started like Saturday night because I’m like ‘Oh, I finished all my shows.’ I spent a week just watching Game of Thrones, and finished the whole thing in about two weeks, which is super unhealthy.”

“Atlanta is changing the comedic game on television,” said Pinnock. “Donald Glover is a genius and that’s definitely a show that I would just give my right arm to be on. That show is just brilliant. It’s beyond.”

Pinnock just started doing television last year after ten years doing theater, and until recently she didn’t have cable.

“I just got cable this year because I was doing shows, I would act on shows and I couldn’t watch it!” said Pinnock. “I would just be like, ‘Hey guys, I’m on tonight. Watch it and let me know how it is.'” 

“It has opened my world to so many things,” said Pinnock. “I’m watching House Hunters, and Flip or Flop, and Chopt, and all these shows that I just never got to watch.”

You can catch Danielle Pinnock on Young Sheldon which airs Thursdays at 8:30/7:30c on CBS.

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