The oral historian has become the archeologist of our collective pop culture detritus, digging deep into questions that probably don’t actually matter, in a strict “Who’s going to ensure the electricity keeps flowing so we can watch all this delicious TV?” sense, but which nevertheless eat away at our brains. Like the one addressed in Jessica Radlof’s new book Young Sheldon, which—in a new excerpt released online this week by US Weekly—dared to ask that most taboo of queries: Was the Young Sheldon “difficult” to work with on the set of Young Sheldon?
And while we might poke a little light fun at the import of this inquiry, we’ll note that the conversation that arises from the question—i.e., whether star Iain Armitage, who was eight when he signed on for the CBS show, was hard to work with at certain points over his nearly decade-long tenure on the series—the cast and crew’s answers were actually pretty enlightening, in so far as they serve as a reminder of how weird it is that we let child actors work at all. We were especially intrigued by Annie Potts’ extremely measured response to these questions, which included acknowledging the very strange position Armitage was put in as a child surrounded by adults constantly treating him like the most important person in the room:
“We were all working for Iain,” notes the ever-outspoken Potts, who’s talked in other venues about having a close relationship with Armitage. “We were all serving him. The characters were meant to serve his journey, so that is a lot for a little person to manage psychologically. He was asked to work and carry the weight of something that would be difficult for an adult, and we know that a lot of behavior comes out in situations like that. Yes, sometimes he was difficult. But I’ve worked with grown-ups who were a lot worse. Sometimes I think he was tired, and sometimes I think he pushed people, and people were kissing his ass! It’s a very challenging situation to be 9 years old and be expected to work, behave, and think like a grown-up. And I say that with absolute love and respect.” (Potts also notes, in another excerpt, that one of her go-to moves with her young castmates was to give them whoopie cushions, “because it allowed kids to be a little naughty in a surprising way,” which is a pretty fun mental image.)
Elsewhere in the excerpt, guest stars like Jason Alexander and Wallace Shawn discuss working with Armitage, balancing their praise for his talent and charisma with acknowledgements that he was, well, a small child being asked to work a full job in addition to regular kid stuff like going to school. “He was very manic at first,” Shawn, who appeared in more than 50 episodes of the show, says in the oral history. “He was wild. And you couldn’t sit down and have a conversation with him. He would be running around, almost the absolute opposite of the character that he played, who was so self-contained and sober. And Iain himself was never contained. He was literally running around the set in circles, and with a frightening amount of energy.”
As for Armitage himself, he responds with the diplomatic manner of someone who is a depressingly old hand at doing press, despite being all of 18 in 2026. “It was a complete privilege to be on this show and play this character,” Armitage acknowledged with politician-at-an-inquiry levels of decorum. “But yes, it was a big undertaking for an 8-year-old. I always did the best that I could, and sometimes kids are not perfect. I was grateful to the people who understood that and gave me grace.”
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