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. That gap — between the shape-shifter the internet loves and the person she's still learning to be — is the key to Ashby Florence.
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.
What the Characters Actually Do for Her
Most people write off Ashby's character rotation as "Type 7 loves variety." But 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 that doesn't hold up. 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" — those aren't words you use if you were already okay. The 6 wing lives in that need for external validation.
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. A Type 7 who feels controlled will bolt. Ben keeps things running without making it feel like a leash.
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.
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