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After she convinces Cole that they would be better off as friends, Jackie finally tells Alex about the real reason she left. Alex is understandably dismayed to learn that his older brother has stolen another one of his girlfriends, but despite feeling an immediate attraction to his new bronc riding trainer, Alex can’t seem to get Jackie out of his head. Shortly after Jackie manages to find his beloved horse, Murphy, who escaped during the Walters’ devastating barn fire in Episode 5, Alex tells Jackie that he still loves her, and the two decide to give their relationship another shot in secret.

Of course, just when Jackie and Alex appear to finally be happy together, Cole decides to confess his love for Jackie, who not only reciprocates but also tells him that he is the only one who makes her want to lose control. Alex ends up overhearing that intimate conversation on the family’s front porch. But before any of them can react, paramedics arrive on the property, with the eldest Walter boy, Will (Johnny Link), revealing that their patriarch George has just suffered a medical emergency.

During a recent break from shooting the show’s third season in Calgary, Rodriguez, LaLonde and Gentry jumped on a joint video call with Variety to break down the biggest new developments in the central love triangle. The male leads even made their best pitch for why they believe Jackie should end up with their character!

What stands out to you about your characters’ individual arcs in the second season? How have they evolved between seasons?

Nikki Rodriguez: For Jackie, a big arc of hers is being OK with not being so perfect and so polished and put together all the time, and how that affects all of the decisions she’s making this season. It’s a tough thing for her to learn because, being a perfectionist, you just want to be perfect all the time. But that’s where she grows the most, and you see a lot of her growth in this season with how she deals with her grief in a different way than Season 1. So I think it’s just about her evolving and figuring out who she wants to be.

Noah LaLonde: There’s a pretty drastic shift in the feeling that you get from Cole Walter in this season. I think it has to do a lot with his continued search for his new identity post the football career that defined him. Season 1 is kind of the first stage of that, having a hard time accepting that that’s really over. And in Season 2, you start to see this version of acceptance — and not just acceptance, but also the repurposing of the built-in skills and abilities and perseverance that he knows he has in him, but doesn’t really access in Season 1.

He’s inspired by Jackie; he really feels strongly about Jackie, and he sees a version of what he could be in Jackie. So all those things combined, I think he’s continuing to try to grow and build who he is, to be the best person he can be — not only for himself, but also for Jackie and for the people around him because he understands that he’s let some people down in that way. So it’s just that continued search for identity and accepting what has happened, and what you can change moving forward.

Ashby Gentry: Alex’s story in Season 2 is about authenticity. It’s pretty naive to say that there’s an authentic version of him and an inauthentic version of him, but rather he’s making use of the façade he creates to access his authentic desire, which I think truly is Jackie. It’s why in the first six-ish episodes, he puts up this front, but it’s not entirely false. It is a real transformation, and yet he isn’t being honest about his true desire until he confesses to her that at the end of the day, in spite of what happens, he still wants to be with her. I don’t think that would’ve been possible without him kind of taking on this sort of character that he portrays in the first few episodes.

Alex confesses that he will probably never be able to get over Jackie at the end of Episode 6, and after they kiss for the first time since their break-up, they repeatedly sneak off into the woods during the day to make out. Nikki and Ashby, what did you want to capture about your characters falling for each other all over again?

Gentry: For me, it was truly about rationalizing it, right? As an actor, it was like, “OK, well, we’ve seen them fall in love, but it didn’t work, so why would they go back to each other?” That’s kind of the point I was trying to make earlier — that it’s sort of like a test. The first half of the season, he’s testing whether or not he actually loved her, as he said in the previous season. Ultimately, it’s not so idealistic for Alex. It’s not about how it happens; he’s more concerned with being with her. That was the ultimate conclusion we came to when we were filming the scene, because we did a number of takes and it wasn’t really satisfying the showrunner and director.

And then Jason [Priestley, who is no stranger to TV love triangles among teenagers], our director, came in and said, “You’re not trying to get her; you just can’t not tell her this any longer.” And that really clicked for me, in that these feelings he has are out of his control. The only thing he’s controlling is the dial to which he allows them to be shown. And that was a clarifying moment for me in my understanding of their relationship.

Rodriguez: That’s a great way to put it: We have seen Jackie and Alex before, so what is different about them coming together this season? For Jackie, Alex makes her feel like she belongs there. That scene was a big moment for them, so we really wanted to explore why it was different this season and how complicated that is and can be.

Jackie and Alex are able to keep their rekindled romance a secret from the rest of their family until the end of Episode 8, when Cole catches Jackie and Alex kissing in her uncle Richard’s rental home. Noah, how did you want to play that moment? Can you give voice to Cole’s internal dialogue?

LaLonde: You only know what you know is happening in front of you, right? And then you fill in the blanks of what you imagine is probably going on elsewhere. I really think that based on everything that’s happened up to that point, every conversation that Cole and Jackie have had, every conversation that Cole and Alex have had — Alex is pretty emphatic about, “We all just need to move on.”

I don’t think Cole had any idea that there was anything else happening. I ultimately think that he held out hope that this was just a temporary thing, that Jackie needed space and needed to be friends first. He really thinks it was like, “OK, let’s take a pause. Let’s do some work on each other and understand all these feelings. And once that pause is over, it’ll make sense to unpause and be together, because it feels like it still feels the same.” Those moments still feel the same — like in the car, when he’s teaching her how to drive, it feels the same for a second, and then it’s not.

Jackie has this intense discipline in every part of her life, whether it be with getting into school or organizing the student council, or everything that goes on. So it makes sense that in the moments where it would feel like the love is present, the discipline would come in and cut it off before it becomes too intense. He just expects that to continue to happen until the discipline lessens and they can have a real conversation.

When I watched it, I don’t know how much you can tell, but he gets the SAT scores back and he goes right to find her, to tell her, “We did this. You helped me do this. We created this.” And he nearly breaks and enters into Richard’s rental and walks in and sees this, and it’s devastating because he’s totally blindsided. He feels like all his work was kind of for naught, so it’s pretty devastating and numbing.

Cole and Alex don’t even have a one-on-one scene until the second half of Season 2, but it’s fair to say, from the little we do see of them together, that there is still a lot of unspoken tension between them stemming from their shared history with Jackie. Noah and Ashby, what is your take on the state of that brotherly relationship? Do you think they will ever be able to move past the awkwardness of having fallen for the same girl, or will Jackie always stand between them?

Gentry: I think you move with these things in life. Like, do you ever get over [those feelings]? Good feelings and bad feelings are like divorced parents at a birthday party: You don’t get to kick either of them out, you just have to stay together. So moving through life, I mean, God, it’s going to suck. But at the same time it’s like, “I have to love you because you’re my brother, and it doesn’t nullify everything we’ve been through hitherto now.” So I don’t think they’ll overcome it, but I don’t think it will tear them apart either.

LaLonde: I don’t know that they’ll overcome it, but I don’t know that it’ll always be the most important thing. There is a real love there, and everybody in the Walter family respects each other because I think they’ve been raised that way. And they’re just kids, so they’re still figuring that out. I ultimately think there’s a lot more of their story to tell. Cole is the older brother, and speaking from the perspective of an older brother, I think you can really love someone and not show that in your actions.

Cole really loves his younger brother. Just the way in which the show has happened to capture this timeline, it hasn’t necessarily shown him in the best light as an older brother, but I really think he cares about him. I hope that’ll continue to shine through because, at the end of the day, Cole didn’t know about Paige and he can’t help how he feels about Jackie. So when you really boil it down, I don’t think there’s been a lot of conscious decisions about, “Oh, I’m going to do this to this person. I’m going to do this to this person.” The heart wants what the heart wants, and I don’t think they’re against each other. 

Let’s talk about that massive cliffhanger — Cole confesses his love to Jackie and reveals that he saw her and Alex together, and Alex ends up overhearing that confession. But before any of them can deal with the potential fallout from their relationships, the trio watch in horror as paramedics arrive to treat George, who has been missing on the property. What do you remember from the process of shooting that final scene, and what do you think is going through your characters’ minds as the screen cuts to black?

Rodriguez: It was an intense scene to shoot. Jackie is in such a torn spot. What is so great about it is she does have such true, authentic feelings for both Cole and Alex, but they are so different and they bring out different sides of Jackie. She doesn’t want to make the same mistake that she did last time. She doesn’t want to be the problem, which inevitably she does again. But it’s just about trying to not hurt everybody and also be true to yourself, which is a really hard thing to do because you can’t make everybody happy. It’s a lesson she’s learning through the season, and everything just crashes down in that one moment.

LaLonde: The experience of finding out that they were still together in some capacity, there’s a certain numbness to it. And I don’t think Cole was going to say anything. He has this self-sabotage tendency when something goes wrong to take it out on the world and really anybody around him, which can be toxic. But when he starts to get aggravated, when they’re all hanging out and having a great little moment of family time, he just walks away, and I feel like he’s just going to walk away.

So when Jackie follows him out there, he’s like, “Why are you doing this now? I’ve been trying to [talk to you] for as long as we’ve known each other, and you’re doing it now. You don’t get it. You don’t understand how important this is.” And when he does finally get those answers, I think it clears some of those things up. But it also still leaves him kind of confused, because he’s been sitting here trying to build this thing [where] his partner in the process just didn’t have the same plans for the construction. So I think he still leaves that conversation very confused. There’s really not even that much to take away in the positive, because it’s like, “I love you too. OK, fine! Take it and get out of here.” And of course, then the ambulance lights come around the corner. So [he’s feeling] confusion, despair, and then more confusion and heartbreak, I’m sure.

Ashby, how much of Cole’s confession to Jackie did Alex actually hear? And what can you tease about the inevitable fallout from that conversation, once the dust settles on George’s fate, at the start of the third season?

Gentry: There was actually a whole scene written, prepared, and filmed where all of the direct fallout from that moment was communicated. We learn exactly how much of that conversation he heard and what he felt about it. Obviously, the scene was cut up and we don’t see that in the final edit, leaving the answer to Season 3. All I can say about where we will find things at the start of the third season is that it’s not at all what I expected.

I admittedly laughed when Jackie’s friend Grace tells her in the finale, “Maybe you should just pick a boy.” So many of their personal issues would be solved if Jackie just chose one Walter boy over another, but for now, the love triangle is alive and well. Nikki, can you pinpoint what specifically Jackie sees in Alex and Cole that has made her fall for each of them? And, on the flip side, Noah and Ashby, can you give me your best sales pitch for why Jackie should end up with your character?

Rodriguez: Alex is so sweet. He’s so caring. He makes Jackie feel like she belongs, like she has a home. Cole brings out that side of her that is a little bit more unpredictable and a little bit more passionate, and that she’s a little bit more drawn to. But she’s just scared of the version she could be with Cole. So I think she does truly love both! But in totally different ways.

LaLonde: Sounds like you’re on team Alex! “She really thinks Alex is sweet and great, and she’s afraid of who she could be with Cole.”

Rodriguez: Oh, I’m on team Alex?!

LaLonde: Yeah!

[Rodriguez laughs, neither confirming nor denying her affiliation — even though she has always maintained that she is on team Jackie.]

LaLonde: But my pitch would just be: Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

Gentry: Alex is willing to do whatever it takes to make Jackie happy, even if that means that she’s not with him forever, and that’s the testament of true love. And I guess I would say, as far as her ending up with him, relationships are more than just feelings. It’s like building a house, it’s a logistical partnership, and she should be with someone who has evidence of making good decisions in that regard.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros and New Line’s Mortal Kombat 2 will now fight toward the start of next summer on May 15, 2026 instead of Oct. 24 this year.

What the? Why is a highly anticipated sequel moving to next year after notching record views for a red-band trailer (107M global views). Precisely that: the Simon McQuoid-directed sequel is bound to deliver tons more in mid-May than staying in the crowded late October frame where 20th Century Studios’ Jeremy Allen White Bruce Springsteen movie, Springsteen Deliver Me From Nowhere, and the next Colleen Hoover feature take, Paramount’s Regretting You, exists. Also, Halloween is the next weekend, and well, that’s not a so-vibrant time at the box office.

Mid-May wound up being a bonanza time frame for Warner Bros/New Line this past summer with Final Destination: Bloodlines opening to a franchise record of $51.6M (the pic was also best in series with a record $138.1M U.S./$301M WW take). To date, the three Mortal Kombat movies from New Line have minted $257.8M around the globe.

We also understand research screenings have been strong for the sequel which stars Karl Urban as Johnny Cage, alongside Adeline Rudolph, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin, Mehcad Brooks, Tati Gabrielle, Lewis Tan, Damon Herriman, with Chin Han, Tadanobu Asano as Lord Raiden, Joe Taslim as Bi-Han, and Hiroyuki Sanada as Hanzo Hasashi and Scorpion.

Mortal Kombat II will go up against Amazon MGM Studios’ Is God Is, and an untitled Neon theatrical release. Warners always had the date RSVP’ed in ComScore.

Screenplay is by Jeremy Slater, based on the videogame created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. Producers are Todd Garner, James Wan, Toby Emmerich, E. Bennett Walsh and McQuoid. EPs are Michael Clear, Judson Scott, Jeremy Slater and Lawrence Kasanoff.

Blurb: In part two, the fan favorite champions—now joined by Johnny Cage himself—are pitted against one another in the ultimate, no-holds barred, gory battle to defeat the dark rule of Shao Kahn that threatens the very existence of the Earth realm and its defenders.