Ashby Gentry says 'My Life With the Walter Boys' is more than a teen love triangle. It's also a show about grief.

Ashby Gentry can’t resist a good love triangle. Case in point? Ahead of Halloween this week, Gentry and his My Life With the Walter Boys co-stars Nikki Rodriguez and Noah LaLonde dressed up as Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) from Luca Guadagnino’s tennis drama Challengers.

Gentry, Rodriguez and LaLonde also comprise a love triangle of their own on My Life With the Walter Boys, which debuted on Netflix in December 2023. Based on Ali Novak’s 2014 Wattpad stories turned novel of the same name, the series follows 15-year-old Jackie Howard (Rodriguez) as she relocates from New York City to Silver Falls, Colo., after the tragic death of her family. Taken in by her mother’s best friend (Sarah Rafferty) and family of seven, Jackie struggles to adjust to her new surroundings and quickly finds herself drawn to dueling brothers Cole (LaLonde) and Alex (Gentry), who often compete for her attention.

The sleeper hit catapulted to No. 1 on the streamer’s Global English Top 10 TV List when it premiered and reached the top 10 in 88 countries around the globe. It was renewed for a second season less than two weeks after its premiere.

Even Robert Pattinson knows that the show exists, according to Gentry.

“He was filming a movie [Die, My Love] while we were here [in Calgary, Alberta] filming Season 2. I knew his trainer, and his trainer told him, ‘There’s this kid that really looks up to you and he’s in this love triangle show.’ So Robert Pattinson is aware that Walter Boys exists,” Gentry told Yahoo Entertainment.

The show’s success is also largely felt on social media platforms like TikTok, where fans draw comparisons to shows like Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, which also features a teen love triangle.

But for Gentry, My Life With the Walter Boys is about more than just romance. Gentry believes it’s also about trauma and the ways we choose to respond to it.

“There’s this void created when this tragedy befalls this young girl, and every character in the show is responding to that trauma — whether it’s Jackie responding to it directly … [or] it’s all of the Walter family who’s responding to the traumatic event of having a new person enter their life,” he said. “It’s all a response to the same trauma, which is [that] this girl’s family died.”

The way Jackie deals with losing her family is complicated. It’s anything but linear. She demonstrates how there isn’t a right or wrong way to grieve.

“There [are] people who experience death and fill that void, but with romance and boy drama,” Gentry said. “What’s different about [our] show is that it certainly takes the form of a love triangle, but the show is about growing up. It’s about family and it’s about learning where you belong in the world. And it’s about grief and it’s about how to get over and move forward with your trauma.”

Netflix has yet to set a premiere date for Season 2, though Gentry said that they'd be shifting the focus from trauma to self-discovery. Audiences will watch as Jackie, Cole and Alex navigate adolescence and delve deeper into understanding who they are and what they want as individuals.

“All three of them are sort of in their own lane throughout the show, making these discoveries,” he said. “Those lanes obviously converge, and they do have to figure out themselves in relation to each other, but before they can do so, it’s almost like they have to transcend this rite of passage and figure out who they are in relation to themselves first. Independently, they’re all experiencing really interesting things and [are] faced with really difficult decisions.”

Gentry advocates for authenticity. Whether it’s candidly depicting a teenager’s grief or bucking the status quo and choosing individuality over conformity, the 25-year-old actor, who recently partnered with Invisalign, isn’t one for convention.

“When it comes to individual beauty, I think it’s subjective,” he said of his own smile and choice to use aligners. “It’s up to the person to decide what they want. I don’t think it’s about form-fitting this perfect veneered smile to the world. That’s so disinteresting to me because it robs a person of their own unique, subjective beauty.”

While Gentry’s riding the high of his show’s success, he doesn’t want to stay in the “YA love triangle” genre forever. (“Not that I don’t love that too,” he clarified.)

“I want to be in a Robert Eggers horror film,” he said of the director, whose films include The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman and the upcoming Nosferatu remake. “He’s been No. 1 on my list for years. That’s definitely a dream of mine. I don’t really have dream roles, but I definitely want to work with him and do one of his movies.”

My Life With the Walter Boys, Season 1, is streaming on Netflix.