September 3, 2025. Ashby Florence stands at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park wearing a letter jacket and a Sharpie-drawn goatee, interviewing Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Hamilton film premiere. One month earlier she was doing print production on Walking Dead comics at Skybound Entertainment. Twenty years earlier her dad was driving her from Virginia to this same city for Broadway auditions that never went anywhere.

Same city. Same dream. Completely different door.

In an interview with Liza Banks, she was asked which of her many characters is her favorite to play. She didn't say Hamilton. She didn't say the Lorax. She said "myself." Then immediately added: "Contrary to popular belief I am a very insecure person."

The woman who can become anyone finds that the hardest character to inhabit is the one she already is. And that gap — between the shape-shifter the internet loves and the person she's still learning to be — explains everything about how Ashby Florence's mind works.

TL;DR: Why Ashby is an Enneagram Type 7
  • Characters as Escape Hatches: Hamilton, the Lorax, Megamind, Gru — each character gives Ashby permission to express a part of herself she can't access as "just Ashby." The Lorax gets to be aggressive and demanding. Hamilton gets to be dramatic. The shape-shifting isn't random; it's a Type 7 processing pain through play.
  • The Long Detour: She trained obsessively for Broadway as a child, pivoted to graphic design when the dream stalled, and broke through at 24 via a sick-day TikTok. Type 7s reframe deprivation as "the scenic route" — and sometimes the scenic route actually gets you there.
  • The Hardest Character: Asked her favorite role, she says "myself" — then admits deep insecurity. The fun exterior masks anxiety. That's the 7's shadow: the terror of sitting still long enough to feel what's underneath.
  • All Doors Open: Broadway, TV, Drag Race, Dancing with the Stars, pop music, podcasts — she refuses to pick one. "I don't want to put myself in a box." Closing a door feels like a small death to a 7.
  • The Tether: Eight years with boyfriend Ben Hunt (they met on a school bus 15 years ago). He literally moderates her livestreams. The 6 wing provides the loyalty and grounding that keeps the manic energy from spinning off the rails.

What is Ashby's Personality Type?

Ashby is an Enneagram Type 7 (The Enthusiast)

Type 7s are the quick-minded optimists who run from pain by running toward everything else — six plans and a backup plan for the backup plan. Their greatest fear: being trapped, deprived, missing out.

The standard read on Ashby is "chaotic comedy creator with ADHD energy." Accurate on the surface. When asked about her future, she listed Broadway, TV, podcasts, judging Drag Race, competing on Dancing with the Stars, AND becoming a pop artist. "You name it, I'm there," she told Liza Banks. She once "worked as a dental hygienist for two weeks at an actual dentistry due to an ADHD hyper-fixation. Pretty sure it was illegal, but fun nonetheless." That's not a side note — that's the Type 7 operating system in miniature. Hyperfixate, dive in completely, leave before it gets boring, frame the chaos as a great story.

But the deeper Type 7 pattern isn't the variety-seeking. It's what the variety-seeking protects against.

Ashby trained obsessively for entertainment from childhood. She gave everything to a dream that didn't materialize for nearly two decades. So what does a Type 7 do with years of unmet longing? She reframes. She pivots. She finds the next thing. She builds an art business, lands a comic book job, keeps the theater kid alive in the margins. She doesn't sit with the grief of what didn't happen. She keeps moving.

Then one night, sick in bed, in what she described to Liza Banks as "quite literally a fevered daze," she posts a Hamilton TikTok with no stakes and no strategy. And 22.4 million people respond.

The breakthrough comes not from the obsessive planning and training — that's the stress arrow to Type 1, the perfectionist energy that drove her childhood — but from the moment she lets go and plays.

The Characters as Emotional Architecture

Here's the insight most coverage misses: Ashby's character rotation isn't just "Type 7 loves variety." Each character is an escape hatch into a different emotional register.

Her Lorax — orange spandex jumpsuit, wiry mustache, stuffed belly — is the standout creation. Mid-livestream, she'll deadpan to thousands of viewers: "Give me money." Beat. Then in a stretched, vaguely Midwestern drawl: "I'm jokinnnn." Tongue out. The bit mocks the unspoken creator economy norm of pretending you don't post for income — she says the quiet part loud, then fake-walks it back, and the transparency itself becomes the joke. In the same breath, she'll announce official environmental decrees: "The squirrels will be relocated. The pigeons will be executed." An environmental character issuing authoritarian kill orders. That's her comedic signature — full commitment to the absurd, delivered deadpan.

The Lorax lets Ashby be aggressive and entitled in a way "insecure Ashby" never could. Hamilton lets her be heroic and dramatic. Megamind lets her play the villain. King Julien (with Ben playing Mort) lets her be imperious and ridiculous simultaneously.

She told Betches her character selection process is "purely because it is a funny visual" — but the psychology beneath that instinct is revealing. The characters aren't masks hiding the real Ashby. They're amplifiers for parts of her that insecurity keeps locked down.

The proof? She's never even seen The Lorax movie. "I've never seen the Lorax, I'm just capitalizing off of it," she joked. The character she created has nothing to do with the source material. It's entirely her — filtered through a costume that gives her permission.

The 6 Wing: The Tether

Ashby's 6 wing shows up in two places: anxiety and loyalty.

The anxiety: she admits to being "very insecure" despite the manic on-camera confidence. The fame has been "therapeutic" and "reaffirming" — words that reveal how much she needed external validation to quiet the internal doubt. That's the 6 wing whispering beneath the 7's bravado.

The loyalty: she's been with Ben Hunt for eight years. They met on an elementary school bus over fifteen years ago. In a world of content-creator relationships that flame out publicly, Ashby and Ben are quiet and steady. He serves as her livestream moderator — literally keeping the chat in order while she spirals into absurdist comedy. During their first Gru-and-Minion livestream, the chat convinced Ben to sit in a plastic bin she uses as a stage prop. It shattered underneath him. The comedy comes from chaos; the relationship holds the structure.

Ben, a Chapman University film school graduate and aspiring director, brings industry knowledge from his own career in film and TV. But their dynamic works because he doesn't try to direct her — he moderates. For a Type 7 who fears being controlled, the distinction matters.

The Detour That Built the Instrument

Ashby Florence was born November 22, 2000, raised in Virginia. Her parents went all-in on her performing dream. "I trained seven days a week to make it in the entertainment industry," she told Betches. "I would skip school to drive to New York to audition for Broadway shows and stay up late with my mom filming self-tapes after dinner."

Three days a week at a pre-professional program after school. Weekends at intensive acting camps. Both parents fully committed — mom enabling the absences, dad doing the Virginia-to-New-York drives. In 2015, a fourteen-year-old Ashby made a Hamilton piggy bank. The show wasn't just something she admired. It lived in her hands.

The entertainment industry said no. Repeatedly. Despite the training, the sacrifice, the childhood built around a single ambition, the traditional path never opened.

A Type 7 doesn't process that kind of rejection by grieving. They reframe. The dream "adapted but never died" — but what actually happened is that Ashby channeled the creative intensity into graphic design. She earned a BFA, founded an art business called "That's More Like It" (recognized by The New York Times and USA Today), worked as a social media director, and landed at Skybound Entertainment in August 2023 doing print production on The Walking Dead Deluxe, Invincible, and Transformers comics.

Skybound is a legitimately impressive place to land — the company behind Invincible and the Walking Dead franchise. But for a kid who'd trained since childhood to be on stage, working behind the scenes on other people's stories carried a quiet irony she'd never let herself name.

Ten Days in a Fevered Daze

August 1, 2025. Ashby is sick. She posts a TikTok dressed as a DIY Alexander Hamilton — letter jacket, cowboy boots, Sharpie goatee — lip-syncing to "It's Quiet Uptown."

"I was VERY sick the night I made and posted my first Hamilton TikTok," she told Liza Banks, "so I was quite literally in a fevered daze but it was around day 3 I realized there was something special going on."

The video hit 22.4 million views. While other creators doing the same trend wore full Hamilton costumes, Ashby sold the character through raw commitment and facial expressions alone. In ten days, she went from 10,000 followers to 1 million. TikTok's official communications account noted the milestone.

She didn't coast. She started doing daily, hours-long TikTok Lives — sometimes before and after her day job — introducing characters at a pace that matched her restless mind. The Lorax. Megamind. Lord Farquaad. King Julien and Mort (with Ben). Gru and Minion (with Ben). Mr. Bobinski from Coraline. The output was relentless.

Within weeks, Lin-Manuel Miranda DM'd her. When asked about the coolest person in her DMs, she told Liza Banks: "It will always and forever be THE Lin-Manuel Miranda." Disney invited her to the Hamilton film premiere at the Delacorte Theater, where she appeared alongside the original Broadway cast on September 3, 2025.

The scale of the shift was disorienting. She told Betches: "I feel like it would help if you imagined someone coming up to you and saying, 'In 14 days, everyone will be talking about you and expecting something from you, oh, and you start twerking live in front of 40,000 people.' It would be a lot, no?"

Her screen time went from ten hours a day to "24/7." The collaborations followed quickly — Smosh, SiriusXM, Zach King, the band AJR. By all appearances, the day job quietly gave way to full-time creation.

The Comedy Nobody Taught Her (But Somebody Trained)

Ashby's comedy resists the algorithmic polish that defines most TikTok content. Fans compare her to Tim Robinson — absurdist, committed, slightly unhinged. Others hear Norm from Cheers in the deadpan. She describes it herself as "genuine, goofy, and reminiscent of early 2000s YouTube."

The specific markers: a vaguely Midwestern accent that elongates words ("I'm baaaashful," "I'm jokinnnn"), a lizard-like tongue stick at the end of punchlines, deadpan delivery of completely absurd statements. Louis Levanti wrote on Threads: "Someone get Ashby from TikTok on SNL IMMEDIATELY. Her ability to improv on TikTok live actually needs to be studied."

Here's what "actually needs to be studied" actually reveals: this isn't untrained talent. Ashby sustains multi-hour livestreams in character, switching between personas with consistent comedic timing and physical commitment. That endurance — the vocal control, the physicality, the ability to hold an audience without a script — is the direct product of years in pre-professional theater. The Broadway path didn't lead to Broadway. But it built every skill that makes her TikTok performances look effortless. No UCB training, no Second City background. Just a decade of theater discipline filtered through ADHD spontaneity and released into a medium with no gatekeepers.

Distractify called her "too wholesome to be cancelled." Other creators openly celebrate her success rather than resenting it. Fans are intensely protective — unusual given that her content is legitimately chaotic, with crude jokes, absurdist tangents, and political songs about deportation and civil liberties. But nothing punches down. The chaos is generous. As one fan put it: "The Lorax speaks for the trees. Ashby speaks for the PEOPLE."

Who She Is When the Camera Stops

Ashby has ADHD and a motor tic disorder. She frames the tic as an "easter egg" for viewers to spot in her videos — classic Type 7 reframing of a vulnerability into a game.

Her current hyperfixation, she told Betches, is cats — "in like a normal cat person kinda way" — which translates to obsessively scrolling shelter listings. Even the hobbies have that all-consuming Type 7 intensity: nothing casual, everything devouring.

The private insecurity is real. "I think people crave authenticity, which, in my opinion, is the easiest thing you can be," she told Betches. "I believe they liked seeing someone who has no idea what they're doing, try to do something." The line reads as self-deprecating charm. But underneath it is a woman who prepared with extreme discipline and still frames her success as accidental — "someone who has no idea what they're doing." Type 7s minimize their own suffering by making it sound casual. All those years of training disappear into a punchline about trying.

"I don't want to put myself in a box," she told Betches about her future. Broadway. TV. Podcasts. Pop music. "Whether that includes what I'm doing now, live shows, podcasts, film and TV, Broadway, you name it, I'm there." Every door open. Every option preserved.

For a Type 7 who spent her childhood watching doors close despite doing everything right, the refusal to choose isn't just optimism. It's protection.

Where She Is Now

By late 2025, the doors were opening faster than she could walk through them. She appeared on Apple TV's Palm Royale Season 2 celebration in West Hollywood. She became a recurring presence on Smosh — multiple episodes of Try Not To Laugh, Board AF, and Bit City, where she was credited as playing "Walter White." She joined Cameo. Her TikTok following hit 2.5 million.

The parents who drove their kid from Virginia to New York for auditions that never went anywhere haven't spoken publicly about the blowup. But consider the arithmetic: they invested years of drives, missed school days, late-night self-tapes, and intensive camps into a dream that stalled for the entirety of their daughter's adolescence. Then a Sharpie goatee and a fever did what all of it couldn't. For the Type 7, the reframe is clean — "the scenic route got me there." For the parents, the emotional math is probably more complicated.

No Broadway deal has been announced. No TV series. But she's moved from the margins of entertainment to its center in under six months, and the trajectory is still accelerating. She told Fourthwall: "People crave realness in a, frankly, fake world."

The realest thing about Ashby Florence is the contradiction she can't quite see: a woman who describes herself as insecure, who says her favorite character to play is "myself," who trained her entire life to perform — and broke through the moment she stopped performing and just played. She's still learning the one role nobody else can understudy.

Disclaimer: This analysis of Ashby's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect her actual personality type.