Sean Giambrone

If you watch

What: “The Goldbergs”

Where: ABC

When: Wednesdays, 8:30 p.m.

By Courtney Crowder

Chicago Tribune

111Instead, he encountered LA kid after LA kid, each with a patina of early experience and a slickness that comes from living so close to show business. Their jokes turned too perfectly, their exits were too framed and their movements too robotic, Goldberg said.

Call it the “Disney kid” problem.

The actors “felt like they had been very rehearsed, very practiced,” Goldberg said. “The acting was broad and cartoony. We just wanted a normal kid who went to school, who hadn’t been trained.”

Then, with the start of production mere days away, Park Ridge, Ill.-raised Sean Giambrone auditioned.

“He talked about video games,” Goldberg remembered of Sean’s tryout. “He really was just a normal kind of sweet, awkward kid, which reminded me of how I would have gone into an audition at that age, just totally clueless and not knowing what I was walking into. It was a slam dunk right when he walked in.”

That was a Wednesday. Sean auditioned again Thursday, was cast Friday and started shooting the pilot Monday.

During a recent (and very rare) hiatus from filming, Sean, 15, whose high-pitched voice oozes innocence, remembered not having “too much time to think or feel” after landing the role of Adam.

“It was really a whirlwind,” Sean said on the phone from California. “It was just excitement and awe and kind of an unknown feeling because this was all happening so fast, but when we started filming, I just loved the whole experience.”

“The Goldbergs,” which airs Wednesdays on ABC, is based on creator Adam F. Goldberg’s home movies. Set in the ’80s, the show follows a mostly average suburban Pennsylvania family of mom, dad, grandpa, older brother, older sister and young protagonist, Adam. Narrated by the older Adam (a la “The Wonder Years”), the series centers on the trials of growing up as experienced by the littlest Goldberg.

While Sean certainly has laugh-out-loud moments, the show shines because of his sincere sweetness. He’s the every-kid, charming to a fault, obsessing over the pop culture of the moment (George Michael and “Star Wars” in his character’s case) and struggling through those important firsts: first crush, first kiss and first game of gym dodgeball.

Off camera, Sean, whose Chicago accent is thick enough to cut with a knife, is as pleasant and likable as his on-screen character, many of his castmates said.

“He’s the finest person I’ve ever met,” said Jeff Garlin, who plays Sean’s TV dad.

Sean became interested in acting about six years ago when he and his older brother, Luke, started making home movies. (A bit of kismet considering his “Goldbergs” character totes a camcorder to film his family.)

“I always had a blast [making those movies], dressing up in the costumes and stuff,” Sean said, recalling a film with a bounty hunter plotline, and another in which he played an Austin Powers-like part. “I loved the whole idea of getting into character. Then, when I was in elementary school, there was a variety show that I acted in. That’s when I started thinking that I wanted to pursue it.”

Soon after, Sean’s mom, Vonda, took him to meet agent Brooke Tonneman, co-owner of Chicago-based Big Mouth Talent. The moment Tonneman met Sean, she knew he was special, she said.

“When you watch him on screen, you are just drawn to him and whatever he is doing in that scene,” she said. “You find yourself watching his character. He can definitely read what a director is looking for, and we could see that in him even at [age] 9.”

A newborn when Y2K fears escalated, Sean turned to the show’s writers — and a heavy rotation of John Hughes films — to learn about ’80s culture.

“If you think about the 1980s, I already knew most of the top things like the big hair and the bright colors,” Sean said. “Once I read the scripts, they just spoke to me as to how the ’80s felt. The writers make it easy to act like I am in the ’80s. And if you watch the movies from the ’80s, they just have a great aura about them.”