Iain Armitage, 18, Finally Addresses the Dating and Sexuality Questions He’s Dodged for Years

Iain Armitage has spent most of his life being watched. Now 18, he’s decided to talk back — or at least, to answer the questions he’s spent years dodging with a laugh and a shrug.

The Young Sheldon star addresses the constant speculation about his dating life and sexuality in the pages of a new oral history of the hit CBS comedy, which hits shelves today. And he doesn’t hold much back. Not in a tell-all, oversharing way — in the way of a kid who’s genuinely baffled that strangers keep walking up to him and asking about his love life like it’s small talk.

“Sometimes people will come up to me in public and be like, ‘Yo, you gay?’ or ‘Man, you dating anyone?'” he says in the book. Look, he’s 18 years old. He’s heard it all — including the persistent rumor that he was dating his fellow child star Mckenna Grace.

“As it is, in real life I’ve also gotten everything from people thinking I’m dating specific people, like Mckenna [Grace], or people thinking I’m gay,” he shares. He’s not exactly rattled by it. If anything, he’s figured out how to make it funny.

His Go-To Responses Are Kind of Perfect

Here’s the thing about Iain Armitage: he’s been in show business since he was a small child, and somewhere along the way he developed a pretty airtight system for dealing with nosy strangers. When someone asks him about his sexuality, his response depends entirely on the vibe of the person asking.

“It depends on the person and what they’re saying, but if it’s a guy asking if I’m gay, I’ll say, ‘Not for you,'” he explains. “Or ‘I haven’t found the right guy yet.'”

Honestly? Iconic. Dry, disarming, and it ends the conversation on his terms.

When people ask the girlfriend question — “Yo, man, do you get a lot of girls? Do you have a girlfriend?” — he’s got a playbook for that too. “I’ll say something funny to make someone laugh and divert the conversation,” he says. “Or, ‘That’s private, dude, don’t ask that.'”

It’s the rare celebrity non-answer that’s actually charming. He isn’t scolding anyone for asking. He’s not launching into a sermon about boundaries. He’s just… an 18-year-old who finds the whole thing a little weird and handles it with humor. There’s something refreshing about that.

Growing Up Sheldon

Let’s rewind for a second, because the reason strangers feel this comfortable asking Iain about his personal life is that he quite literally grew up on television. Cast as nine-year-old Sheldon Cooper in 2017, he spent seven seasons — through 2024 — carrying one of the most successful sitcoms on network TV on his very small shoulders.

Think about that for a minute. He was eight when he started. Eight! Most of us were still figuring out how to tie our shoes without incident, and this kid was memorizing pages of dialogue stuffed with physics jokes and delivering them opposite seasoned adult actors like it was nothing.

Before Sheldon, he’d already stolen scenes as Ziggy Chapman in HBO’s Big Little Lies — the kid from the preschool biting incident whose storyline quietly broke everyone’s heart. And before that? He was a tiny, precocious theater critic on YouTube, reviewing Broadway shows with the confidence of a man three times his age. His mom, Lee Armitage, is a theater producer; his dad, Euan Morton, is a Scottish stage actor. The kid never really stood a chance of having a normal childhood. Theater was in the water.

He voiced Chase in Paw Patrol: The Movie, played young Shaggy in Scoob!, and popped up in The Glass Castle with Brie Larson. By the time Young Sheldon wrapped its seven-season run, he’d basically spent a full decade as a working actor — and done it all before he could legally vote.

So yeah. When people feel like they know him, there’s a reason. They watched him grow up week after week, season after season. But there’s a difference between feeling like you know someone and walking up to them in public to ask about their dating life. Iain seems to get that distinction, even if some strangers don’t.

The Book Spilling the Tea

The new book — Young Sheldon: The (Juicier-Than-Meemaw’s-Brisket) Inside Story of the Hit Comedy, written by entertainment journalist Jessica Radloff — promises a deep dive into how the series came together and what it was really like behind the scenes. Oral histories like this live or die on honesty, and it sounds like Radloff got plenty of it.

Iain’s candor about the invasive questions is one headline. But the book also contains a more eyebrow-raising detail: one of his co-stars apparently called him “difficult at times.”

Whoa. Okay. Let’s sit with that for a second.

To be fair, context matters — a lot. We’re talking about a kid who was eight when the show started and fifteen when it ended. That’s the exact age range where every human being on earth is, to some degree, difficult. Add in the pressure of headlining a network sitcom, the hours, the homework tutors, the constant public scrutiny… and honestly, “difficult at times” starts to sound like a pretty mild verdict.

Plenty of former child stars have told far darker stories about what those years were like. If the worst thing a co-star can say about Iain Armitage is that he was occasionally difficult as a teenager, that’s practically a glowing recommendation in this industry.

Why This Matters More Than Gossip

Look, celebrity speculation stories can feel frivolous. But there’s something genuinely interesting about the way Iain handles this — especially now that he’s 18 and clearly setting the terms for how his adult career and public life are going to work.

He’s not doing the big dramatic coming-out-or-not statement. He’s not feeding the rumor mill with coy hints. He’s simply saying: this is the stuff people ask me, here’s how I handle it, and some of it is none of your business. That “That’s private, dude, don’t ask that” might be the most grown-up thing he’s ever said in public. And he’s said a lot of grown-up things in public for a very young person.

There’s also the Mckenna Grace thing to address — because that rumor has followed both of them for years. Two extremely talented former child stars, both articulate, both constantly working, both growing up in the same weird fishbowl. Of course the internet decided they were dating. The internet decides everyone is dating. Iain’s response to that particular rumor has always been a version of: we’re friends, calm down. Which, coming from him, you believe. The kid has never once seemed like the type to play games with this stuff.

And maybe that’s the real story here. After a decade in the spotlight, Iain Armitage has emerged as someone who knows exactly who he is — funny, direct, a little cheeky, and completely uninterested in performing his private life for public consumption. The strangers asking “Yo, you gay?” aren’t going to get a press release. They’re going to get a joke, a deflection, or a polite-but-firm boundary. Take your pick.

What’s Next for Iain

With Young Sheldon in the rearview and the book tour circuit presumably beckoning, the question is what Iain does next. He’s at that fascinating crossroads every successful child actor hits: the audience still sees the kid, but the kid is now legally an adult with opinions, boundaries, and — clearly — a fully developed sense of humor about the whole circus.

His theater roots run deep, and it wouldn’t be shocking to see him return to the stage, where it all started with those adorable YouTube reviews. Or he might keep building the screen career, picking projects the way he’s always seemed to pick them — with taste beyond his years.

One thing’s for sure: whatever he does, he’ll do it on his terms. He’s been telling us that since he was eight years old. We just weren’t listening closely enough. Turns out, the kid who played the most socially oblivious character on television is one of the most socially aware young actors in Hollywood. Go figure.

Source: Just Jared