How do you go from playing the tough teen girlfriend of a South Central gang member to the tender sweetheart of two Colorado high school brothers? If you’re Nikki Rodriguez—who snagged the starring role of Jackie Howard in the new YA drama series My Life With the Walter Boys after briefly appearing in the final season of the Gen Z comedy On My Block—it’s about finding commonality with the material. “I would say there’s a little bit of both characters in my own personality,” Rodriguez says. “I really try to highlight the characteristics of each that I align with.”

For Rodriguez’s latest role, the connection was deep. In the coming-of-age story adapted by executive producer Melanie Halsall from Ali Novak’s novel of the same name, she portrays a sophisticated, ambitious 15-year-old Manhattan high schooler whose life is suddenly upended when her family is killed in a car accident.

“I’ve been on my own from a young age, and I suppose that’s probably what really drew me to Jackie,” the guarded actor tells VF. “I didn’t grow up in a typical family dynamic…. [and] I know exactly what it feels like…having to juggle all these challenges of growing up and how hard that can be. I really had to learn how to be strong and independent early on and not rely on anybody, and that’s a lot like Jackie.”

The petite 20-something performer (she’s loath to reveal her exact age) is an only child who was raised mostly by her British German mother in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and moved to LA straight out of school to study acting after a trial run, accompanied by her Mexican dad, when she was 15.

“My family died…and nobody knows what to say to you when that happens,” the usually stoic Jackie tells her new school guidance counselor Tara (Ashley Holliday Tavares) in the first episode, after the grieving tenth grader has been sent to live with her fashion-designer mother’s veterinarian best friend, Dr. Katherine Walter (Sarah Rafferty, late of Suits). Her new guardian is mother to a brood of 10 (including one daughter and two nephews), living with her rancher husband, George (Marc Blucas), in rural Colorado. There, Jackie must navigate a completely new life—and the complicated feelings she develops for two of the Walter brothers.

Broody and charismatic Cole (Noah LaLonde)—whom we meet exiting a swimming pool in slow motion—is the town’s high school football star and girl magnet, though his quarterback days are over due to an accident that’s permanently damaged his leg. His sweet and geeky one-year-younger brother, Alex (Ashby Gentry), loves books (he’s rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring), video games, and riding horses—and he quickly catches feelings for Jackie.

Rodriguez’s winning performance as the grieving teen caught up in a romantic triangle—and stymied by a new school that doesn’t offer enough AP classes—was further aided by how similar the actor is to her alter ego. Both of them have a type A, overachiever vibe—though “I’m a little less emotionally introverted,” she says, and “tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, where she sometimes does not.”

Jackie spends the show in a house full of raging hormones, and teen angst, with each boy performing opposing romantic gestures: Alex shows Jackie his Rocky Mountain version of Manhattanhenge, and Cole rebuilds her late-sister’s broken teapot. There’s also bad blood between the brothers over a past entanglement that Jackie knows nothing about. So, is Rodriguez Team Alex or Team Cole? Neither: “It’s so selfish to say, but I’m gonna say Team Jackie at the end of the day.”

The sprawling cast includes a bevy of Walter brothers (Johnny Link is the hard-of-hearing eldest Will, Connor Stanhope is Cole’s fraternal twin, Danny, and Corey Fogelmanis is sensitive musician Nathan); friends (Alisha Newton is Cole’s sometime girlfriend, Erin, who warns Jackie that she’s “not buying this little orphan Annie act,” and Jaylan Evans and Ellie O’Brien are Jackie’s new friends, Skylar and Grace); and Jackie’s Uncle Richard (Alex Quijano). They filmed the series out of order, without rehearsal, over five months in Calgary, Canada. “They actually didn’t really want us to have a rehearsal,” Rodriguez explains. “They…wanted to see what happened organically, which was kind of the way that we shot the show….[It] was both very interesting, and also terrifying,” she adds, laughing. “Because I like a lot of control, and I felt like I had none.”

Shooting nonsequentially also meant Rodriguez had to work harder to find Jackie’s “fish-out-of-water aspect” in an early episode when the ex–New Yorker is subjected to things like a hair-bleach hazing by some of the Walters. By the time they actually filmed that scene, Rodriguez says, she felt “so comfortable and so connected” to her castmates.

The star and her love interests, LaLonde and Gentry, began bonding even before filming began, during the horseback riding lessons they took together. (The fast-learning actor is quick to boast how her cattle-herding skills were better than either of the guys’.) Along with some of their other castmates, the trio took a road trip to Vancouver after shooting wrapped.

Still, her favorite alliance was with Rafferty, whose Katherine gently supports Jackie even as she’s trying to get to know her. Rodriguez—who hadn’t seen Suits before filming—says the veteran actor offered her lots of advice, and was “really there for me. I adore her.”

Wise counsel about the increased scrutiny she’s about to face came courtesy of Jason Priestley, who directed the season’s final two episodes, and who has some experience with sudden fame from his Beverly Hills, 90210 days. “[He] said just enjoy it as much as you can and stay in the moment,” Rodriguez says. And if that’s not enough, the newly minted star can refer to the wrap gift she received from showrunner Halsall: a clutch with a quote from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.”