It may be tough to separate actor Iain Armitage from Sheldon Cooper, the character he’s played on Young Sheldon since 2017, but there are ways to tell them apart. For one, the 15-year-old Armitage adores animals; Sheldon fears them. Sheldon grew up in the fictional east Texas town of Medford; Armitage calls Arlington home.
Still, Armitage says he will miss the character when the series ends in May.
“It’s very hard because it’s been basically half my life,” he says. “I’m of course very sad but also happy, and I feel so grateful that I’ve gotten so much wonderful time with our incredible cast and crew and writers.”
Armitage was only 8 when he donned his Christmas Day best, stood in his grandmother’s Savannah, Georgia, home and gave an audition his all. His mother, Lee Armitage, a theater producer and the daughter of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, recorded it.
“It was so not professional,” Armitage says, but it did the job. “They sent us out to California. We sat down with producers and we just talked…. When we got home, we got the call.”
How the show ends, he can’t say—he’s filming the seventh of the series’ final 14 episodes now—but he feels good about Sheldon’s path.
“I’m very excited to see what [the writers] come up with because their scripts are so interesting,” he says. “These episodes that we’ve been filming have been some of the funniest I’ve ever gotten to work on, and I’m having a great time, so I think people will absolutely love them—at least I can only hope.”
In a way, we know how things play out for the prodigy. Young Sheldon is a spinoff prequel to The Big Bang Theory, an award-winning sitcom that aired on CBS from 2007-2019 and followed the lives of four California Institute of Technology scientists. (Jim Parsons won four Emmys for playing Sheldon as a young adult.)
The future is less certain for Armitage, who has earned multiple Critics Choice and Kids’ Choice award nominations for his portrayal of Sheldon. He doesn’t know where his next job will take him.
But he has already graced the big and small screens. He was the voice of Chase in 2022’s PAW Patrol: The Movie and appeared in HBO’s Big Little Lies drama series from 2017-2019. The list of actors he’s worked with reads like an Academy Awards nominations announcement: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, Nicole Kidman, Woody Harrelson and Brie Larson.
“I think I might be doing a movie after Young Sheldon, which would be really cool, but I don’t know,” he says. “I’ll go wherever they want me.
One place he always wants to be is his home in Arlington’s Ashton Heights neighborhood. “Arlington’s the best,” he says, adding that he comes home whenever he can. “I don’t even live in California. We only rent a house. Arlington is my main home. That and New York are my favorite places to be. Don’t get me wrong: I love California, but…I like the East Coast.”
He was last here around Halloween, and he spent time at some of his favorite spots. “I do live there, so it’s less going around and seeing sights and more going about my daily life,” says the teen, who is homeschooled. He describes each homecoming as his time to “just sort of live a normal Virginia teen life.”
He never misses an opportunity to go to Jhoon Rhee Tae Kwon Do, where he began taking martial arts classes at age 4 and earned a black belt in June 2022. “At this point in my tae kwon do journey, I’m allowed to help teach younger kids and also lower belt levels,” he says—which he does when he’s in town.
One of his favorite places to eat is Rus Uz (1000 N. Randolph St., Arlington), a Ballston restaurant serving Russian and Uzbek cuisine. “It is so good,” Armitage says. “I also speak Russian and pretty much all the people there speak Russian. It’s really fun.”
Armitage enjoys learning all sorts of languages. “Our neighbors in California speak Assyrian [from the region around Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey], so I learned a little bit of that,” he says. “And then I speak a little bit of Sinhalese [which is native to Sri Lanka] just because it has such an interesting-looking alphabet, which I love to learn how to read. And then, of course, I speak a tiny bit of German, I speak some Italian [and] Spanish.”
For the next few months, though, he’ll be focused on Sheldon. “I personally haven’t shed a single tear yet over this, but I know the last week I’ll be crying,” he says. “I think it will be really hard to say goodbye, but at the same time, I can’t be too sad. I’ve had seven wonderful years getting to play such a fun and interesting and weird and awesome character. It would be pretty selfish and a bit rude of me to want to be moan-y about it.”
The final season of Young Sheldon starts on CBS on Feb. 15 at 8 p.m. The hourlong series finale will air May 16.