What were you doing when you were 9-years-old?
Certainly not starring in your own TV show.
Consider the incredible journey of Iain Armitage. The young actor, seen most recently in the HBO limited series “Big Little Lies,” is now playing “Big Bang Theory’s” chief geek Sheldon Cooper, who is also age 9 in “Young Sheldon,” which premieres Monday at 8:30 p.m. on CBS. The boy wonder’s in high school in the prequel to the hit comedy that stars Jim Parsons as “old” Sheldon.
So how does a kid skip paper routes and go right to the dream job, the kind even adults have a hard time getting?
You start your career on YouTube, of course. Iain, sitting down in a West Hollywood photo studio on a Saturday morning with his mother, Lee Armitage, shares how it happened. As the child of theatrically inclined parents (his mother is a producer; his father, Euan Morton, is an actor, currently playing King George III in “Hamilton” on Broadway), Iain started making his own video theater reviews, posting them on the social media site.
“Some agents had seen them, and they saw a boy with a personality who liked talking,” says Iain, nattily attired in black trousers, a white shirt, checkerboard slip-on Vans and a gold bow tie. “Two agents asked [me and my mother], ‘Would you like us to represent you?’ We said no, because it just didn’t seem right for me to do that [a TV show], I might change my mind. After a week of doing a show, I might be like, ‘OK, I don’t want to do it anymore.’ ”
He was only “6 or 7.” One agent invited Armitage and his mother to New York to explain themselves. They took the train from their home in Arlington, Va.
“We came in with our long list of reasons” for not signing with an agent, says Iain. “And they had great answers for everything. And we signed on. And ever since then, everything’s been super great.”
Agents were not the only adults falling for him. Social media gadfly Perez Hilton was an early mentor, having seen Iain’s video reviews posted on the Facebook page of his friend, cabaret performer Christine Pedi. In 2015, Hilton hired Iain to cover the Tony Awards for him.
“I saw the reaction he would get from people, and the reaction he would get from the Broadway community,” Hilton tells The Post. “He loves the shows, and they love him. I feel like a proud uncle watching him flourish now.”
David Rubin, the Emmy-winning casting director of “Big Little Lies,” was also familiar with Iain’s reviews and was eager to test him for the show’s part of Ziggy, an innocent with just enough ambivalence about him that his motives might be misconstrued.
“I wasn’t prepared for Iain’s ability to behave so truthfully while saying lines that were scripted for a character,” Rubin says. “He’s a natural born actor, with the bonus of being influenced by all those great performances he’s been lucky enough to witness on the New York stage.”
Iain won his role on “Young Sheldon” by sending another home video of him reading the part to the producers of the series, Chuck Lorre, Steven Molaro and Parsons.
“[Steven] and I sent the video to Jim, and we went, ‘I think we just got extremely lucky,’ ” Lorre said at a summer conference for television critics.
For his part, Iain is reveling in his lucky streak. “I think of it this way. If you have a fishing pole and you put your fishing pole in the water, and you’re waiting for a couple of fish to come by, first I got a pretty awesome fish — ‘Big Little Lies’ — then I got a couple of more really awesome fish. ‘Young Sheldon’ was like . . .”
The little boy inside the precocious talent giggles. “I would be pulling it, saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, this fish is so big,’ ” he says. “It’s such a great part, and I feel super lucky.”
The series takes place in East Texas, where Sheldon lives with his family and attends the same classes as his teenage brother George (Montana Jordan). Having a gifted child in the family is an adjustment, with Sheldon’s mother (Zoe Perry) being more adaptable than his football-coach father (Lance Barber).
The producers asked Iain to dye his hair brown for the role (“I’m usually a total blondie,” he says), and he quickly learned the TV production drill, which is very different for a kid actor. His workday starts anywhere from 7 to 9 a.m. and he works for 9 ¹/₂ hours. Before you call the California Board of Labor, one of those hours is set aside for lunch and an additional three are reserved for school with his teacher, Miss Maura.
“Miss Maura does two things. She teaches me, but she also looks out for me to make sure I’m in safe conditions,” Iain says. “So nothing unfair or inappropriate is happening.”
Leaning in from a nearby couch, Mom, Lee, elaborates. “She is also making sure that if they’re using mist [in the studio] that the chemicals are safe for kids,” she says. “In ‘Big Little Lies,’ there was a gun, a fake gun, but she still had to go over the safety rules for that.”
‘He loves the shows, and they love him. I feel like a proud uncle watching him flourish now.’
Iain also has an adult stand-in who fills in when the set is being lit and a photo double who takes his place for long shots after Iain has worked his quota of hours. “But I love doing [the show] so that’s like saying 4 ¹/₂ hours of play-time,” he says.
One of the many surprising things about this young actor is that he doesn’t play video games or watch a lot of TV. Home-schooled with the Math-U-See method by his mother, he loves to read. “The last really good book I read was ‘Henry Reed’ [by Keith Robertson and Robert McCloskey],” he says. “There’s a Henry Reed series . . . He’s really smart and he has ingenious solutions to some things.”
His other favorite thing is collecting bow ties. “I don’t have the most in the world. I don’t have the least in the world,” he says. “Maybe 20 or under. I love fashion.”
With 31 million social media views for the pilot since May, “Young Sheldon” seems destined for a good run. And the producers seemed destined to be entertained by their young star, on- and off-camera. “Big Little Lies” director Jean-Marc Vallée fondly remembers Iain’s inquisitive personality.
“This kid, he likes to talk,” Vallée says. “And he has hundreds of questions about what I wear, what I do, how I dance, what [music] I listen to, what are we going to have for lunch, but he’s in the moment when he needs to be in the moment. But before that, he’s a kid.”