Raoul Trujillo builds tough characters through movement, with a dancer’s attention to the body. We rate that care, though Blue Beetle is a frustrating example of how little a film can do with it.
Fi1m perspective
In Blue Beetle (2023), Raoul Trujillo’s Carapax has a metal suit and a repetitive task: hit the boy in the other metal suit. Ángel Manuel Soto’s film gives its Mexican-American hero a family worth spending time with, while allowing his opponent much less to work with. Carapax provides menace, but the part asks for little beyond fighting. It is a limited use of an actor who puts thought into how each character moves. The trouble here begins with what he has been hired to do.
His dance background helps explain that care with movement. After an early role as the Iroquois chief Kiotsaeton in Black Robe (1991), he played Tomocomo and worked on choreography for Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). The breakthrough came as Zero Wolf, the ruthless Mayan antagonist in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006). Chiefs, warriors and threatening men recur through his screen work. His approach involves shaping walks and gestures for individual characters, which gives us reason to look beyond the familiar casting.
His later work includes Rafael in Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), while television has given him a longer-running part as Che ‘Taza’ Romero in Mayans M.C. (2018–2023). He also plays Jay Stewart in UNTAMED (2025), whose investigative pairing of Eric Bana and Lily Santiago is more engaging than its mystery. Our reservations about that series concern the familiar detours and forced turns, rather than his performance.
Blue Beetle makes the problem particularly clear. We found ourselves waiting for the Reyes family to return, because their company interested us more than Carapax’s fighting. There is enough warmth in that household to make the film decent entertainment, despite a plot that rarely surprises. That qualified recommendation should not be mistaken for enthusiasm about what Trujillo is given to play. We would welcome another antagonist written with as much care as he puts into the walk.
Biography
Raoul Max Trujillo is an American actor, dancer, choreographer and theatre director. Born on 8 May 1955 in New Mexico, he trained as a dancer and was a soloist with the Nikolais Dance Theatre. He was the original choreographer and co-director of the American Indian Dance Theatre, and has hosted dancing programmes.
Trujillo has worked in film, television and theatre for more than 45 years. He is known for playing Zero Wolf in Apocalypto (2006), Rafael in Sicario (2015) and its 2018 sequel, Black Knife in Cowboys & Aliens (2011), and Carapax in Blue Beetle (2023). He has appeared in series including True Blood, The Blacklist and Mayans M.C.. In 2025 he played Jay Stewart in the Netflix series Untamed. He received a Critics' Choice Award nomination for his work in Saints & Strangers.
