My Life With the Walter Boys viewers have concerns about Ashby Gentry‘s 16-year-old character, Alex, being romantically involved with an 18-year-old in season 2.
Season 2, which premiered on Thursday, August 28, reunited Jackie (Nikki Rodriguez) with Cole (Noah LaLonde) and Alex (Gentry) after time away from her new hometown. After returning from New York, Jackie saw Alex with his new love interest: rodeo trainer Blake (Natalie Sharp).
Alex’s romance with Blake didn’t sit well with some viewers due to their age difference.
“Hot take. What does this grown woman want with this 16 year old BOY,” read a TikTok video about Alex and Blake, while someone else replied, “I know people are saying she’s 18 but she looks so grown. Like they could’ve cast someone who looks a little younger. When I first saw her I thought she was in her 20s.”
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Another Netflix viewer pointed out how their “age and height difference made him look like a little kid.” (Gentry is 26 in real life while Sharp is 29.)
“Their ages in real like are close but she just looks so much older and I wish they made her older, it would make her career more believable in my opinion and then have them just completely leave out her shooting her shot with Alex,” read another comment.
Based on Ali Novak‘s 2014 novel of the same name, My Life with the Walter Boys follows recently orphaned Jackie (Rodriguez), a teenage girl from Manhattan who relocates to rural Colorado after she is taken in by the Walters, a family of seven sons and a daughter.
Before the show returned late last month, Gentry reflected on his experience on the seemingly losing side of a love triangle.
“Our fanbase is so young. It’s like, these are kids who haven’t grown up. They don’t know what they’re saying,” Gentry exclusively told Us Weekly about the reaction to the show. “But when the [season 2] trailer came out, I got really, really, really sad. I was like, ‘I’m gonna have to go through this all over again.’ … You know in [The Summer I Turned Pretty] when Conrad is like, ‘My chest hurts, physically hurts?’ Yeah, I felt like that when our trailer came out. I was like, ‘Man, this is making me really sad.’”
Gentry noted that he saw the similarities between My Life With the Walter Boys and The Summer I Turned Pretty, a show on Prime Video about a love triangle involving a girl and two brothers.
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“We always get compared to [The Summer I Turned Pretty], so I feel like it’s appropriate to talk about them. But I was talking to some people the other day, and I was like, ‘Man, I feel for Gavin [Casalegno], a little bit,’” he continued. “I don’t know him, but here’s the thing: I definitely feel like a lot of the hate I received was, like, residual [toward] Gavin. Which is crazy, because our characters are so not the same.”
The actor admitted it isn’t always easy to see the reactions to their show.
“This job is just a personal business. It is my person at the end of the day… I saw someone say when the [season 2] trailer came out, ‘No matter how attractive Alex gets, I just can’t be attracted to him because he’s 5’7 in real life.’ Which is like, that’s fine. But also — have you never heard of the short king face card theory?” he added. “The way that I look, to some degree, is the way that I look. And so when people are critical of that, it’s like, I’m gonna take that with me forever. Whereas when people are critical of Alex, it’s a little more understandable, because my job as an actor is to showcase a character’s flaws just as much as their strengths.”
My Life With the Walter Boys season 2 is streaming on Netflix now.
