Two of these three statements about Bentley Storteboom are false. Guess which.
1. Is he Dutch? Storteboom means "Fallen Tree" in Frisian, spoken by 400,000 people in the northern regions of the Netherlands, like these shirtless guys watching ice skating in 20 degree weather (-10 C).
He may look 25 in the top photo, but here he looks like 16-year old Gavin Munn of The Righteous Gemstones.
Bentley was born in August 2012, in Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver. According to his mom, “He wasn’t your typical boy that wanted to play soccer or sports,” but he was interested in movies and the theater, and started asking about how kids got on tv. His parents had no experience in performing arts, and had no idea. Kudos for not trying to push him into sports, Mom and Dad. My parents never let up. "You're a boy! Boys like sports! Try out for football!"
They did some research, enrolled Bentley in the LeClerc School of Acting, and found him an agent, and he started auditioning at age six. Soon he was appearing in commercials, and got the starring role in the student film Small Boy (2020): "After getting left out during a hide and seek game, a small boy realizes what he wants is different than what he was seeking from others." So, different from the others? Gotcha.
That fall he won two Joey Awards (for Canadian youth): best actor in a commercial and best actor in a student film.
In 2020 he won an iconic role in the series finale of Supernatural (2020). As Dean is dying, he tells his gay-subtext partner Sam that he must "carry on." The time for the "manly love of comrades" is over; it's time to accept his heterosexual destiny. A few years later, Dean looks down from heaven and sees that Sam has acquiesced: he's got a wife and kid (Bentley). And the kicker: they're playing ball! Bentley might not be "like the other boys," but his son is. We hear the Kansas song:
Lay your weary head to rest. Don't you cry no more.
Funny, I feel like crying at this negation of the gay experience.
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Episodes of Nancy Drew (2021) and YoShowBiz (2021) followed, but Bentley's big break (at age eight) came with what the local papers breathlessly praised as "a recurring role on a hit tv show!" It was Riverdale (2017-2023), the campy, over-the-top, NSFW adaption of the Archie comics world.
Left: KJ Apa, formerly Archie.
Bentley played Dagwood, one of the twin children of Betty's older sister Polly and Cheryl's brother Jason (Trevor Stines, left), in Seasons 5 and 6 (2021-22). Who names their kid Dagwood? He gets the worst of both families: the Blossom curse that kills all firstborn children (he manages to live), and the darkness that plagues the Cooper family, which turns him into a bully. According to Bentley's Mom, this was a lot of fun for the "gentle child" who sometimes got bullied himself. Gay kids are often bullied, Mom.
More after the break