Spoilers for Season 2 of My Life with the Walter Boys are ahead! You can stream all ten new episodes now with a Netflix subscription.
I feel like a pillar of movies and shows about young romance, and specifically those involving love triangles, are secrets. Typically, they’re prominent in many YA stories, and that’s certainly the case for the latest of Netflix’s 2025 releases, My Life with the Walter Boys. So, when I had the chance to interview the three leads about Season 2, I asked them about all the secret-keeping, because, to be honest, it frustrated me a bit. In response, they gave me answers that justified their characters’ actions and changed my mind.
Ahead of the release of My Life with the Walter Boys' second season on the 2025 TV schedule, CinemaBlend had the chance to interview Nikki Rodriguez, Noah LaLonde and Ashby Gentry, who play Jackie, Cole and Alex, respectively. Seeing as they’re the three points of the show’s primary love triangle and the keepers of many secrets, I had to ask how they felt about all of them. It turns out, they totally get why their characters stay tight-lipped, as LaLonde told me:
It's funny, because it is a TV show, right? And so the fact that so many people are, or will be, privy to the like, ‘Hey, let's just keep this a secret’ thing, it feels a little embarrassing to see that come up so many times. But in reality, I find myself doing that so often just because, you know, different insecurities, different concerns about the spread of information and the spread of personal information.
He makes a good point. While I’ve never found most secrets to be good, a lot of the time, candid information shouldn’t be known by everyone. So, in Cole’s case, the fact that he didn’t want to tell anyone about Jackie helping him with college applications made sense because it was a topic he was very sensitive about.
Speaking further about that small trusted circle and why it’s important to keep some information just between two people, the Cole actor said:
It's like, ‘Hey, can we keep this between us?’ Or, I'm a big fan of [the] triangle of trust, cone of silence. ‘Hey, trust tree, right? We can speak in confidence?’ Just because I like to be transparent and deep, and building those paths of trust are pretty difficult in everyday life. So, I don't think keeping it a secret is all that crazy.
While he noted that it’s not crazy to do this in real life, and I agree for the most part, he did acknowledge how odd it can be for viewers to know all the secrets in play. When they compound, it can get frustrating to see so many people not being transparent with their loved ones, as LaLonde said:
I think the fact that everybody gets to watch you do it is weird. It's like, ‘Can we keep this a secret?’ And then everyone's like, ‘Oh, that's shady.’ But like, in reality, it should have been like a one-on-one thing.
He’s right, it is a one-on-one thing. However, when Jackie agreed to secretly help Cole with his college admissions work around the same time she and Alex decided to keep their relationship a secret in Episode 7, I got a bit fed up. That’s a lot of secret-keeping in one go, and it’s not even close to the first secrets they’ve kept.
But I digress. From the characters’ perspective, I see where they’re coming from. As Nikki Rodriguez told me, it’s a “really tough situation,” and their choice to not tell anyone about things like this was understandable.
Ashby Gentry agreed with that too; however, he was critical of Alex and Jackie’s inability to keep a secret well, as he told me:
I kind of understand it. I mean, it's already messy enough. I think being out in the open about it would be even worse to some degree. My advice would be, if you're gonna keep the secret, maybe pull it off a little bit better. You know, maybe lock the door or something. Yeah, that'd probably be my two cents.
The Alex actor is seemingly talking about the scene where Cole walks in on his brother and Jackie kissing, making their secret relationship not so secret anymore. And I'm with him, if they were going to keep to their relationship to themselves, they should have also literally kept it under lock and key.
All in all, the messiness of the best teen dramas is what makes them so fun, and all the secrets in My Life with the Walter Boys help them do just that. Plus, as these actors said, it also isn’t unrealistic to keep things tight-lipped in real life, so it shouldn’t be in the show either. But boy howdy does this family love a secret…especially when it’s in relation to the show’s primary love triangle.
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