Courtesy of Entertainment Tonight

Jim Parsons’s wonderful character “Sheldon Cooper” in CBS’s hit show The Big Bang Theory now has a prequel called Young Sheldon, starring Iain Armitage as the younger version — and Jim is absolutely smitten!

“Iain is just really special,” Jim told Entertainment Tonight. “We saw lots and lots of tapes and we saw lots of auditions and there’s something about Iain that just popped immediately. There was no denying it as soon as you saw his face and he handles the language well and he memorizes easily, and the biggest thing of all is he’s just an excellent actor. I don’t know how someone so young acts so well. I didn’t when I was his age, but he does.”

He added: “We sort of buddied together and sometimes it would range from stuff like, ‘Say this line a little differently because Sheldon would think of it differently.’ ‘Don’t smile.’ He really didn’t need very much help. In some ways, he’s too good of an actor, at first blush, with the material. He’s listening too well. He’s being too empathetic, which is really good acting but not in this case. There were just a couple things you had to curb, like, ‘I know you want to laugh and smile and be nice to people [but] don’t do that anymore!'”