‘I’m enjoying every step’: ‘Georgie & Mandy’ star Montana Jordan on real-life inspiration for playing a young dad and challenges of leading TV’s top sitcom

Since 2017, Montana Jordan has played oldest Cooper family brother Georgie, but he was the one who was most often overlooked because of the attention-sucking presence of his genius younger sibling, Sheldon Cooper. But now that Sheldon is off living his post-The Big Bang Theory life, Jordan and Georgie are doing the sequel thing on Young Sheldon spin-off Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, where barely-out-0f-his-teens Georgie is married to the 12-years-older Mandy (Emily Osment), raising their first child, and, as of the season finale, plotting some big moves towards making a good life for his wife and daughter.

Jordan, who, at 22, is just two years older than his character, has made some big movies, too, namely becoming the leading man of network TV’s top-rated comedy in George & Mandy’s First Marriage’s first season. Jordan chatted with Gold Derby about the success of Season 1, the whirlwind way he lost one job and got a fantastic new one five minutes later, about the major real-life experience that informs his performance as the maturing Georgie, and how he tackled the challenges of going from Young Sheldon’s single-cam format to filming a multi-cam comedy — for the first time ever — with Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage.

It’s incredible. You know, Young Sheldon had a great run. had seven great seasons of it, and going into this new show, a different format with multi-cam now, anytime that you can get under Chuck Lorre’s wing, you’re doing alright. So I’m very thankful to be here.

What was that transition like for you, moving from the Young Sheldon world to leading man on Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage and going to working in the multi-cam format for the first time in your career? That’s a significant change, but you did it and you did it with great timing and the humor that were seamless.

You know, going into it, I didn’t really know what to expect. They always told me that there’s a live audience and this and that, but you really don’t know what to expect until you get up there and do it. It can be a little nerve-racking with the 180 audience members just sitting there looking at you. I’m not much of a nervous person, but it took about one episode to get over the nerves and get in front of everybody. It’s really incredible when you get the instant feedback from the audience and just seeing all the smiles. … I’m enjoying every step of it.

Do you feel like you feed off of the audience, that energy?

you really can’t feed off of it too much, because at the end of the day you’re still creating a TV show. That’s one thing that I had to realize, that, yes, there’s the audience, but you can’t play it up for the audience. At first, I was, not on purpose, but I was just acting it up for the audience and just performing more, I guess you’d say. But no, you just gotta realize you’re still creating a TV show at the end of the day. But it is nice to have that instant feedback, it really is.

It feels a little more interactive? So it must be kind of a challenge for the first time you’re creating a comedy for television in front of a live audience. And especially since you were going from playing the same character you’d played for seven seasons and adapting him to this new format. I think, again, your timing and choices were really spot on.

Jordan: Well, thank you. Yeah, that’s another thing … waiting for the laughs. You ain’t got to do that on single-cam. So that’s a little different, too, when you’re in the scene and you’re playing all these different emotions and this and that. It can be a little tricky to have to wait a second, and sometimes it feels a little weird. But, you know, once they get in the editing room and work around all that, it all works out. Mark Cendrowski, our director, he always says if anything, just wait a little longer, because you don’t want to cut the laughs off. You just wanna wait if there’s that extra beat, just stand in there, because they can always cut that out in editing.