Antonia Gentry doesn’t know what time it is. Her phone shattered the night before we meet for this interview, and she is now straddling the space-time continuum that is the sum of hours between when you contact the Apple Store to order a new phone and when they can deliver it to you.
To be fair, no one in New York City really knows what time — or day or month — it is. The chilly-but-not-cold weather suggests it might be October, the calendar claims it’s February, and the fact that, after we part, Gentry will head to an Allure photo shoot to model spring makeup alludes to it being April or May.
Nevertheless, Gentry is right on time to meet me for breakfast at a café in Brooklyn. It isn’t far from her apartment, she says, which, as a self-proclaimed introvert, she doesn’t like to leave unless absolutely necessary — say, to go to Toronto to shoot episodes of her hit Netflix show, Ginny & Georgia.
Gentry stars as Ginny, a teen navigating high school drama while grappling with the reality that her mother, Georgia (played by Brianne Howey), has a very sinister past. Gentry landed the role two weeks after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta. Is there a certain level of pressure that comes with having your first big hit right out of the gate? “Yes,” she replies in a matter of milliseconds.
“I think it’s because in so many ways this character feels tailored to me, [but] also I know that I want to do more,” she explains. “It’s the fear of, ‘What if I can’t top this?'” But if you’ve watched her emotional performance in season two — throughout which her character battles self-harm — you know that Gentry has range.