Older Sheldon Was Fine With Ending Young Sheldon

Young Sheldon’s Iain Armitage has happily moved on from his show of seven seasons. In an interview featured in Jessica Radloff’s upcoming book, Young Sheldon: The (Juicier-Than-Meemaw’s-Brisket) Inside Story of the Hit Comedy, an oral history on the hit prequel series, Armitage admits he wasn’t upset that the show didn’t go further than its natural end point. He felt it was “heavy and annoying and weird” to mourn the show’s ending when he still had the rest of his life ahead of him. “Plus I wanted to be in Virginia. I wanted to be traveling, and I’m happy to do whatever movie comes up. And my mom has always imbued me with a very healthy sense of ephemerality, and the fact that nothing good can last and everything changes, and that’s a good thing,” he adds. “I would hate to be on a show playing 23-year-old Sheldon. That would suck. I wouldn’t want to do that. So it was a perfect time to end it.” He felt out of everyone on set, he was the “most happy” about the show ending.

Armitage was offered to reprise his role as Sheldon in the spinoff of a spinoff, George and Mandy’s First Marriage, but he declined. “They wanted Iain to be on the Thanksgiving episode … and they were kind and generous about it,” Lee Armitage, Iain’s mother, explains. “The more I think of it … we maybe could have gotten to a ‘yes,’ but he and his agent thought it was important to do other roles first. Maybe there would be some time in the future where it could happen, and that would be wonderful.” Series co-creator Chuck Lorre felt “disappointed” that Iain declined the invite but understood why. He says in the book, “We wanted this story to go forward for this family, and obviously Sheldon is a critical part of this family. The Thanksgiving episode that would have included him would have been wonderful to do, but their reasoning is understandable.”

Iain still has a lot of love for the show and for his co-stars. “Looking back now, it’s nostalgic sad,” he says. “Like, I miss working at Warner Bros., I miss the crew and the people I love. I love the act of acting. I love doing it. It’s fun. But not really specific moments. More the overall thing.”