Before a superstar girlfriend made him tabloid royalty and before a video leak made him a pariah; before one coach sent him to the bench and a new one rescued him from it; before he was Swaggy P or could even dunk, Nicholas Young wanted to be in the movies.

Specifically, he yearned for a life as a Hollywood stunt man.

His mother, Mae, took Nick and his brothers to Universal Studios and the future Lakers guard became enamored with the anonymous role players who ran through fire and fought with swords and scaled walls without suffering a scratch.

At home, Nick jumped off the roof of the garage and the family’s Culver City apartment. He built ramps in the street to perform bicycle tricks.

“He was a very difficult child,” Mae Young said, “because he was constantly bruised and cut and scraped up.”

Scared that Nick would eventually do real harm to himself, Mae enrolled him in gymnastics, where he could hone his stunt skills.

“He’d come home trying to put on shows,” his older brother, Terrell, said, “show people what he’d learned. Then the next thing you know the rest of his friends would try to do it. It would be funny, a bunch of kids trying to take fake punches and (do) flips.”

Stunt men, however, know only how to fall from buildings, not from grace.

While Nick practiced the art of resilience, how to pop right up and smile through pain, his hobby offered no lessons in what to do when a gentle landing was not guaranteed, nor how to dodge blows he never saw coming.

It did nothing to prepare him for life with the Lakers.

SMILING THROUGH MISERY

“I became the bad guy over the last two years,” Young said one day in October after the Lakers wrapped up practice. “That’s something I’ve never been. I’ve been the good dude.”

Right now, all is well in the world of the Lakers starting shooting guard. He is averaging 14.7 points, knocking down 36.7 percent of his 3-point attempts and, get this, has frequently been touted by Coach Luke Walton as the team’s best perimeter defender.

“This is most definitely a redemption year,” Young said. “That’s why I’ve been working so hard; I believe in myself, believe that I’ve got talent. There were just certain situations that made me take steps backwards.”

Where to begin?

After a career year in 2013-14, in which he averaged a career-high 17.9 points per game Young, now 31, signed a four-year, $21 million contract that promised to keep him in his hometown and with the team he grew up rooting for through 2018.

If only it was that easy.

“It’s my fourth year and I was supposed to be gone a long time ago,” he said.

He assumed he would be playing overseas by now. All summer, that’s what he heard. That he would be traded or released and probably end up in China. He can joke about it now, but over the past two seasons under Coach Byron Scott, his productivity and opportunity nosedived.

Despite a glowing spread in Sports Illustrated in January 2015 that dubbed him “the man behind the swag,” Young became the goofy face of the Lakers’ downward spiral. In each of his first three seasons, the Lakers set a franchise record for losses.

“They was just putting everything on me,” Young said. “That’s why this was the big summer for me. I heard the worst.”

His engagement to Australian hip hop star Iggy Azalea was called off in the summer, three months after a leaked video, recorded by teammate D’Angelo Russell, caught Young discussing intimate relationships with women other than Azalea.

One of the NBA’s most ebullient personalities had been muted. He felt that he’d become a whipping boy for Scott. His influence on young players like Russell and Jordan Clarkson was questioned. On the court, he took a backseat to Lou Williams, a 2015 free-agent arrival whose game mirrored Young’s. He became acquainted with the bench, which Young says was the greatest indignity of them all.

“When you see Nick smiling all the time, you think that’s a smile of joy,” Young’s father, Charles, said. “He ain’t happy all the time he’s smiling. It’s what’s behind the smile.”

It was, in fact, a miserable year for Swaggy P.

“You can’t get no lower than that except death,” Terrell Young said.

ELIMINATE DISTRACTIONS

When Luke Walton arrived as Scott’s successor in the summer, he didn’t know what to expect from Young. Walton knew about the Russell video, and the divide it created in the Lakers locker room. He also had seen Young play over the previous decade, and believed he would be an ideal fit for his up-tempo offense.

But where was he? While other players were practicing daily at the Lakers facility, Young rarely came in.

“I didn’t know if he was training or if he was just in the ‘I’m not going to be there anyway’ type of mode,” Walton said.

Young was training, actually. Two weeks after the conclusion of a 17-win Lakers season, Young returned to the gym with Terrell, a former center at Biola University. They worked out as often as three times a day, either at a sports complex in Calabasas or the nearby Shepherd of the Hills Church.

“It has always upset me that people have a misperception of Nick,” said Mark Bartelstein, Young’s longtime agent. “He is actually an unbelievably hard worker who takes tremendous pride in his game.”

Walton and Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak stayed in contact with Bartelstein and their message was clear: Young needed to eliminate the distractions if he wanted to remain a Laker.

“We made a decision this summer … let’s not give anybody something to talk about other than his game because that’s what has always been most important to him,” Bartelstein said.

The organization faced an Aug. 31 deadline to cut its losses, waive Young and pay out the $11.1 million remaining on his contract evenly over five seasons.

Young sweated that deadline until it passed.

“Of course it humbled me,” he said. “I told myself I’m just going to go out there and play my heart out this year. I don’t want to hear all the rumors. Just go out there and dive on floors, and just be Dennis Rodman if I had to this year.”

NEW BEGINNING

Charles Young spoke loudly to combat the crowd that filled his living room to watch Young start against the Sacramento Kings on Thursday night. Charles blames Scott for the sharp negative turn in his son’s career.

With a new coach on board, he recognized the opportunity before his son, but knew it was tenuous.

“They already don’t want you there,” he said he told Nick, “so don’t give them no other reason to not want you there.”

Before training camp, the video with Russell lingered. Even though Young and Russell said they could coexist, many had their doubts. Charles Young cries hypocrisy on that subject.

“Donald Trump (said) the same thing Nick did and he became President of the United States,” he said. “Nick told his boy something in confidence and they wanted to trade him. Everybody said he shouldn’t even be in the league.”

Walton intentionally did not make a big deal about Russell and Young coexisting in the locker room, but said “we were going to keep an eye on it.”

Today, they comprise the Lakers’ starting backcourt.

After the first day of training camp, Walton thought Young seemed somewhat distant, so he pulled him aside. He told him, “We don’t have judgments on anyone here. So if you come in and you work and you buy into what we’re doing, you can earn playing time on this team.”

For the first time in years, Young felt empowered.

It was a reversal from the feelings that tugged at him all summer.

“I felt like it was over here for sure,” he said. “Felt like it was over here and I was going to get bought out and have to prove myself all over again. But I am still proving myself and I still got a ways to go.”

Said Charles Young: “All Nick needed was a chance, a coach to believe in him.”

Young continues to live in the Tarzana home he once shared with Azalea and works to grow his own clothing label: “Most Hated Player.” He has semi-seriously retired the moniker Swaggy P and now jokes that the young Lakers should call him “Uncle P.”

In a recent home game against Dallas, Young scored the Lakers’ first 13 points. Two nights later, in a dizzying fourth-quarter sequence against the Kings, he grabbed a rebound and went coast-to-coast for a layup, then, back on defense, poked the ball loose from All-Star center DeMarcus Cousins and sprinted back in time to swish a 3-pointer.

The Kings called timeout and Young did not run to the bench. He skipped.

“There were some real low points,” Bartelstein said. “That’s why I get so much joy out of seeing him so happy now. It’s real. He’s not just putting on the smile. He’s having the time of his life.”

Nick Young has fallen. He knows where the bottom is because it nearly broke him.

“I don’t want to end my career the way it almost ended,” he said, “being forced out of the league. I want to go out when I can’t move my legs no more.”

Contact the writer: boram@scng.com