Anthony Ramos gives large, noisy productions someone worth listening to, often by keeping his voice down. We rate his humour and ordinary frustrations more highly than several of the films that have hired him.
Fi1m perspective
In Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023), Ramos is stuck in the passenger seat of Pete Davidson’s Mirage, a car that talks and will not let him steer. We laughed at the first Brooklyn chase because his frustration makes the question of who is in charge worth caring about. Editors William Goldenberg and Joel Negron cut to Ramos’s face rather than the car, and for a while this is a working buddy comedy. He is worth watching even when the film around him is not.
The route here runs from the stage roles of John Laurens and Philip Hamilton in Hamilton (2015), through a supporting part in A Star Is Born (2018), to Usnavi in In the Heights (2021). His conversational delivery has survived the move into action films. As Noah Diaz in Steven Caple Jr.’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, he plays a capable man who cannot get paid for what he knows. He keeps his voice down, a welcome choice in a film that will eventually have plenty of shouting.
That usefulness survives less satisfying writing. In Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money (2023), his Marcos works a GameStop till under a patronising manager, part of the supporting cast that gives the film its warmth. Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters (2024) makes Javi the man who brings Kate a scanning system and an offer of work, sending her back towards storm chasing. Neither film gets more than a qualified recommendation from us, and we would like the scripts to ask more of him.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (2025) gives him the loneliest job in the film, at a missile defence base in Alaska. He fits into its tense ensemble without needing to become its centre. The change to Ryan Murphy’s series The Beauty (2026) brings Antonio, a role Ramos plays with a willingness to follow the material into excess. That commitment is welcome when the tone wavers between black comedy and horror, but it cannot repair the scattered storytelling.
We would like a film to give his comic timing more room. The exchanges with Mirage work because Ramos can make an ordinary irritation hold our attention amid all that noise. A comedy that does not require him to compete with the effects would be a sensible next assignment.
Biography
Anthony Ramos is an American actor and singer. He graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy and began his career in stage musicals.
In 2015, he originated the dual roles of John Laurens and Philip Hamilton in the Broadway production of Hamilton, for which he won a Grammy Award. He later received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the 2020 filmed stage recording.
Ramos has appeared in films including A Star Is Born (2018), In the Heights (2021), Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) as Noah Diaz, Dumb Money (2023) as Marcos Garcia, Twisters (2024) as Javi, and A House of Dynamite (2025) as Major Daniel Gonzalez. He is also credited on the series The Beauty (2026).
