Isabela Merced

In Superman (2025), Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl has wings and little else to establish who she is. We found that frustrating: she is present among the heroes, yet the film scarcely gives us a person to care about. The film keeps adding characters and crises, and Merced is one of the performers left with too little to do. We would rather see her given time to make an impression.

Her early work in youth television included 100 Things to Do Before High School (2014–2016), but Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) gave her a more revealing dramatic part. Opposite Benicio del Toro, her Isabel Reyes moves from anger to blankness without making the change look like an acting exercise. The face becomes harder to read, which makes us want to watch it more closely. A lead in Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019) followed; by Turtles All the Way Down (2024), she was taking on lead drama. Those parts make the narrowness of her franchise assignments harder to excuse.

Alien: Romulus (2024) repeats the problem in a better film. Fede Álvarez makes the horror frightening, but Kay belongs to a supporting crew whose members are each allotted one trait and one job. Andy gets the development, expressed through changes in his shoulders and diction; Merced is left with much less to work on. We recommend it to horror enthusiasts, with a warning about the borrowed ideas, but would not start here for a proper look at what she can do.

Her arrival as Dina in the second series of The Last of Us in 2025 brings action, humour and vulnerability together in one part. That is a more encouraging assignment, though our enthusiasm for the programme’s first series is not a judgement on her performance in the second. We would like to see more parts that let her be funny as well as frightened, and stay with her long enough for both to matter. For evidence of her dramatic restraint, go back to Sicario: Day of the Soldado.