There has been no bigger sitcom in recent times than The Big Bang Theory, and few characters from television have seen the kind of explosive popularity enjoyed by the show's resident genius and all-around pain-in-the-butt Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Parsons shared his thoughts on how Sheldon would be doing in 2020 tackling the global lockdown.

"He was built for this. This is the moment he was waiting for. I was saying earlier, we had an entire episode - which I didn't think about until recently - where he did like a Shel-bot where he had like a video screen on a remote-control wheelie thing. And that was when people still needed to get together in groups, and so he would just send that out and sit in his room. 'Don't touch me, don't sneeze on me.' And so, I guess, he'd be fine."

Sheldon was a notorious germaphobe, and his prodigious intellect meant that he was always on top of the latest strategies to prevent infection. Like Parsons mentioned, Sheldon once actually locked himself away in his room and went about his day-to-day life via a robot acting as his long-distance puppet. Basically, Sheldon was practicing disinfection and social distancing before it was cool.

Of course, the paranoid and intensely anti-social Sheldon audiences knew and loved/hated in the earlier seasons was far removed from the man he became by the time the show ended, when he not only got married, but accepted that his life is richer with other people in it. So it is likely that Sheldon in 2020 would have used his expertise not just to keep himself safe, but also look after the safety of his entire building.

Although The Big Bang Theory ended last year, it could have easily gone on for several more seasons, if Parsons had not actively made the decision to step away from the show. While fans mourned the show's ending, Parsons has previously revealed he had been in a really dark place when he decided to quit the series with a desire to explore new avenues of creativity.

"I was so beaten down. I walked out for curtain call [on Boys in the Band] and I slipped and I broke my foot. It was the scariest moment for the next couple of days because I felt like I was at the edge of a cliff... I was teetering and I saw something really dark below between the death of the dog. The bottom line was that it was a really intense summer. The dog passing away, he was 14, and Todd and I had been together for 15 years at that point, so it just was the end of an era. I had this moment of clarity that I think you're very fortunate to get in a lot of ways, of going: 'Don't keep speeding by'. You know? 'Use this time to take a look around'. And I did."

This comes direct from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon