Warning: spoilers for My Life with the Walter Boys season 1 ahead.
My Life with the Walter Boys is shaking things up for season 2, and that includes some pivotal changes for Ashby Gentry’s character Alex.
Based on Ali Novak’s 2014 novel of the same name, the Netflix series follows a city girl named Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez), who relocates to rural Colorado after her family dies in a car crash and she is taken in by her mother’s best friend, Katherine Walter, who has eight children of her own.
Along the way, we see Jackie adjust to her new life while also forming an attraction to two of the Walter boys, Alex (Gentry) and Cole (Noah LaLonde). Though she dates Alex throughout the first season, the finale includes a cliffhanger ending as she acts on her feelings for Cole.
Speaking exclusively with PEOPLE about his new partnership with Invisalign, Gentry teased that the events of season 1 are certainly going to affect his character going into the latest season.
“The best way to describe it is, the characters sort of age with the audience,” he says about how season 2 compares to the first. “Alex was 15 in season 1 and he’s 16 in the second season, and they go through all of those experiences that kids go through for the first time. A lot of season 1 was novel experience, whereas season 2, at least for Alex, is a story of discovery.”
“They’re trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in the world and what do they want with each other, with everything that lies beyond high school and the greater scheme of life,” he continues of the characters. “It’s slightly more intense, as I’ve said, and it’s really about them trying new things.”
He adds that Alex, in particular, has “changed a lot over the summer” teasing he might be a little jaded in the new season following the events of the season 1 finale. “How could you not be? I would be worse than he is,” Gentry admits. “He doesn’t know how to handle what happened and is figuring out how to handle that. And he tries new things, and some of them work and some of them don’t. There are two tragedies in life, either you don’t get what you want or you get exactly what you want, and Alex experiences both in season 2.”
In fact, he says that while he was “Team Alex” for season 1, he has actually switched to the opposing team for season 2. “Based off of the way Alex behaves in season 2 and the type of changes that he goes through, he’s like a different person,” he says of his character. “I think I might be Team Cole this year.”
Like shows such as The Summer I Turned Pretty and The Vampire Diaries, fans have really gravitated towards the love triangle on the Netflix series. For Gentry, he believes that all comes down to the human experience.
“It’s a real story,” he explains. “I was talking with our showrunner about this and it was sort of like, ‘The love triangle thing, how long do you think that’ll go on for?’ She was like, ‘I don’t know. Until it’s done.’ I have people in my life who are in these ridiculous situations romantically, and they just keep going back to each other and keep going back to each other. It’s so true.”
“So I think it’s attractive because it transcends genre,” he continues. “It’s a structural phenomenon that replicates itself over and over and over and over and over again in real life. I think people enjoy knowing, that familiarity of that situation, of watching something and seeing themselves reflected in what they see on screen and thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been here before. That’s so-and-so and so-and-so from my life.’ And it’s fun to pick a side and a team.”
As for the comparisons to The Summer I Turned Pretty, which also follows a young girl caught in a love triangle with two brothers, Gentry admits he’s intrigued by the collation but thinks the shows are pretty different.
“The only thing I have to say about them is I’m really curious to know what happens when they start getting asked about us,” he quips. “I’m not saying this in an antagonistic way. I wish them all the best. And their show is super popular. It’s more so I’m curious to know what they think of us.”
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Season 2 of My Life with the Walter Boys is coming to Netflix in 2025.
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