Isabela Merced had big shoes to fill in The Last of Us season two.
Not only was she joining an already-beloved cast, she was doing so as a love interest to the main character – Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey – and essentially replacing another: Pedro Pascal’s Joel. Plus, there was the prospect of criticism from the show’s more rabid fans, some of whom had already been very vocal in their displeasure around Ramsey’s casting.
All this, as a relatively unknown actor whose last big role was as Dora the Explorer in the 2019 film — quite a way away from the gritty, dark, brutal world of The Last of Us.
We already knew Ramsey was going to be excellent, but Merced? It’s safe to say that she has aced the brief, and then some. It’s a star-making role, and one that’s has seen her more than hold her own against Ramsey: equally able to play a romantic lead as she is to stab people and mushroom zombies in the neck, repeatedly.
“I feel like I’ve been sitting on this secret for a while,” Craig Mazin, the series co-creator and showrunner, told the New York Times as part of a profile on the actor. “And the secret is that Isabela is a big S star, and people are about to find out.”
Part of that success is hers, of course: she’s a versatile actor with great range. Born in Ohio in 2001 to a Peruvian mother and American father, her parents suggested acting as an outlet when her family home was destroyed in a fire.
Soon enough, she’d landed the the lead role on the Nickelodeon television series100 Things to Do Before High School, gradually amassing a CV that included work in the Transformers franchise, Madame Web and Alien: Romulus.
When she appeared in 2018 thriller Sicario alongside Benicio del Toro, critic Anthony Lane wrote that she was “terrific… and her character’s fortunes can be read in her eyes.”
But part of it is also the way in which Dina has been written for a show that’s come out ten years after the game introduced her as a character: a way that Merced has built on along with the showrunners.
“I think when it came to Dina, I did know that she would be more fleshed out. I didn’t know how, but I knew she’d be a much more important part of this season,” Merced told an Australian news site.
“I think it snuck up on me sometimes, like when I’d receive a script and they’d have a lot of paragraphs, and I was like, ‘Oh damn, Dina’s kind of got this boss girl energy, where she’s able to triangulate, and she’s able to give a breakdown as to what the plan is.’
“And I really love those changes. As opposed to her, you know, being kind of blindly devoted to Ellie. She has her own purpose and drive.”
Clearly, it’s the kind of role that she’s been champing at the bit to do.
“It’s funny, because people see me and they’re like, What a small, cute little girl!” she told the New York Times. “But I actually see myself as a very strong person. I see myself as an c So it’s going to be nice for people to maybe see me the way I see myself for once.”
It’s true that Merced’s Dina has much more agency in the show – and much more personality. In the games, Dina is a constant companion to Ellie, but one who exists to support her as Ellie goes about the bloody business of exacting revenge on the people who have wronged her.
In the show, we get to dive deeper. In addition to seeing the relationship dynamics between Ellie and Dina at the start of the show, we find out that Dina, not Tommy, is the person who ends up being captured by Abby’s group during their revenge mission.
That sense of guilt (compounded by the fact that Dina was the one to drop Joel’s real name in front of Abby) gives Dina a motive of her own for setting out with Ellie for Seattle.
And while Ellie is the brawn of the operation, Merced’s Dina is very much the brains, plotting a route for the pair to take through Seattle from enemy intel on a stolen walkie talkie, and using her powers of deduction (a human version of the video game’s “listen mode”) to determine just how many infected they’re facing before they appear.
Merced has also had more so sink her teeth into in terms of character development. In episode five, the showrunners also fleshed out her backstory in a way that the games neglected to do. Along with Ellie, we learned that Dina originally lived in a “cabin in the woods” with her mum and sister, somewhere in the wilds of dystopian America.
When she was eight, she went to go and play outside – when she came back, a raider had attacked her family. She killed him.
“Holy shit,” Ellie says, eyes wide. And Merced sells it for all she’s worth, as she does the scene in which Dina watches Ellie play guitar, which she later told Variety was the moment she realises “she’s in love.”
It also helps that the chemistry between Merced and Ramsey is excellent, too.
“Bella and I were just so comfortable with each other,” Merced said, adding that the pair tried to ‘advocate’ for each other on set when it came to getting their voices heard. “And also, we both have experience in queer relationships — you can just tell when a girl hasn’t kissed a girl before. You can just feel it.”
In addition to Merced’s refreshing matter-of-factness about her queerness, she’s also been very open about how she and Ramsey changed the script when it came to filming the pair’s sex scene.
"We all had ideas, right? Because we wanted it to be sexy. We wanted it to be emotional and charged, but also smart and show their relationship and how it’s going to change now that this barrier has been broken,” she said.
“Specifically, I wanted Dina to be the one to unzip her own pants, take Ellie’s hand and actively guide it down her body. Even though Ellie is technically the one on top, I think it’s showing they both have agency in this decision to take it to the next step… we made some really wise decisions there."
As the show reaches its endgame, Merced is clearly a force to be reckoned with, both on- and off-screen. And with another season of The Last of Us to go – as well as multiple roles in the bag – it’s clear we’ll be seeing a lot of her in future.
The Last of Us Season 2 is streaming on Sky Atlantic and NOW
