Isabela Merced

A house fire gave her a career. When Isabela Merced was young, her family's home burned down (her father was the firefighter on call). Her parents enrolled her in a local production of The Wizard of Oz to give her something else to think about. By 10, she was on Broadway in Evita alongside Ricky Martin. Nickelodeon came next, then supporting turns in Transformers and a praised performance in Sicario: Day of the Soldado. The real pivot was Dora and the Lost City of Gold in 2019. She led a live-action kids' film that grossed $121M on a $49M budget, which is how you prove you can carry something.

Critics kept finding ways to praise her even when the films didn't deserve it. Madame Web was a critical disaster in 2024, but reviewers still flagged her performance as the best thing in it. Alien: Romulus worked better, one of the biggest summer films of 2024, and she carried it. Then The Last of Us Season 2 landed on HBO and the conversation shifted. As Dina, she got called the season's standout, confirmed for Season 3, and simultaneously signed on as Hawkgirl across multiple DC projects. She's stacking franchises at 23, which is either a good problem or a very good problem.

She changed her last name from Moner to Merced in 2019 to honor a grandmother who died before she was born. She never met the woman she named herself after. Her mother is Peruvian from Lima, and Spanish was her first language before English. She recorded a debut album at 13 on Broadway Records and later signed with Republic for an EP that leaned into Latin pop. The music career exists alongside the acting career, neither one consuming the other. Filming Dora partially in Peru was, by her own account, the first time her identity on screen matched her identity off it.