Isabela Merced is ready to slay (and not just zombies)

Actress and singer Isabela Merced eight her dog Pluto in Los Angeles on April 25, 2025. Her new role in “The Last of Us,” and a coming turn in “Superman,” show a fiercer version of the actress, more in line with how she sees herself. (Adali Schell/The New York Times)

By Robert Ito

On a cool morning in late March, actress and singer Isabela Merced was walking BonBon, her Chihuahua, on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. “He likes to be behind you,” she warned after we became tangled. Her dog Pluto, whom she adopted in Australia while shooting “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” had stayed home that morning. Pluto was rescued with three legs.

“He tried to jump over a fence that wasn’t completely done,” she explained.

In Season 2 of the hit HBO series “The Last of Us,” which began April 13, Merced plays the new character Dina, a wry, flirty, tough-talking orphan who loves killing clickers, the most afflicted of the show’s fungus-infected zombies. “That’s her hobby!” Merced said.

Dina also has a thing for Ellie (Bella Ramsey), her killing partner. In the season’s first episode, their relationship heats up with a kiss during a dance at a holiday party, as Dina’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Jesse (Young Mazino) — and much of the rest of the town — watches from the sidelines. Dina seems positively gleeful to play the provocatrice.

“I’d like to imagine that’s how I would be in the Apocalypse,” Merced said of her character.

Will Ellie and Dina’s love last? “I would love to tell you everything!” she said. Because of some major plot twists, however, HBO has kept a tight rein on what it shares with journalists about the new season — and on what its stars can talk about.

“I love talking,” she said, “So yeah, it’s been very hard for me.”

After a run of critically applauded but less-visible roles, Merced, 23, may be at a turning point with “The Last of Us,” a hugely popular and award-winning series in which she plays a starring role. (Its first season became HBO’s most watched debut season and garnered 24 Emmy nominations, winning eight.) Dina is central to the second season’s vengeance-driven plot, her humor and sarcasm a coping mechanism in a postapocalyptic world overrun by hordes of mushroom-headed zombies.

Merced was staying at a nearby hotel to better facilitate a string of press engagements, and we had agreed to meet early for a meal at Great White, a popular brunch spot recommended to her by a friend. (Merced lives in the Valley.) BonBon still needed a walk, so I suggested we walk around a bit before lunch so we could talk and check out some of the local shops. Merced and BonBon both were game.

On that morning, Merced could still move through the world relatively anonymously. As of Sunday, that may have begun to change. And it may change even more this summer, with her role as the mace-wielding Hawkgirl in the James Gunn reboot movie “Superman.” After 2025, a reporter may never get to spend such a leisurely morning in public with her and BonBon again.

“I feel like I’ve been sitting on this secret for a while,” Craig Mazin, the series co-creator and showrunner, said later by phone. “And the secret is that Isabela is a big S star, and people are about to find out.”

Although Merced’s career began in earnest when she was in grade school, she has increasingly received attention in recent years for lead roles in little-seen films, like the 2024 film “Turtles All the Way Down,” and for small roles in bigger ensemble films like the 2022 “Father of the Bride” remake. (Her early credits are as Isabela Moner, her birth name; she chose a stage name in 2019 that honors her maternal grandmother.)

She was often described as the best thing about “Dora,” in which she played a teenage version of the intrepid young explorer. New Yorker critic Anthony Lane called her performance with Benicio Del Toro in “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” an “absorbing double act,” likening them to John Wayne and Natalie Wood in the John Ford Western “The Searchers.”

The actress is “terrific,” Lane wrote, “and her character’s fortunes can be read in her eyes.”

By phone, Ramsey confirmed Merced’s outgoing nature, citing all the times Merced had tried to convince Ramsey to go out while they were filming in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Isabela was always trying to get me out of the house,” Ramsey said. “She’s so fun to be around, and she kind of forces everyone else to have fun, too.”

We headed back to Great White, where a table was waiting; Merced Googled what to eat. “It says ‘best banana bread ever!’” she read. BonBon checked out a dog at the next table.

Between bites, Merced explained that when she learned that Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the show’s other creator, wanted to meet her, she figured it was for a small role.

“I thought maybe I was going to be one of the villagers,” she said.

Instead, she was given the role of Dina on the spot, based largely on her performance in the “Sicario” sequel — no audition, no chemistry read with Ramsey.

“Auditions are cool, but they’re never really real, and sometimes you just need to go by instinct,” Mazin said. “We went by instinct there, and our instinct was spot on.”

Merced is excited about the “opposites attract” relationship between Dina and Ellie, and about playing a major LGBTQ character drawn from a hugely popular video-game series. “I’ve been queer my whole life, so I never really thought about it,” she said. “But I remember playing the game and seeing the scene in the dance and thinking, That’s so cool.”

Like Ramsey, who was cast in “Game of Thrones” at 11, Merced has spent most of her life performing: Growing up in Cleveland, she did community theater at 6; Broadway at 10, alongside Ricky Martin in “Evita”; and starred in the series “100 Things to Do Before High School” at 13.

Asked if she had a five-year plan, Merced said she did. “I actually wrote down a list this past full moon,” she said. “Go to more live concerts, give more hugs, be more present, take more pictures.”

“Oh, and love more freely!” she added.

She also looks forward, she said, to people finally getting to see “The Last of Us” and is excited about her turn as Hawkgirl in “Superman.” In the comics, Hawkgirl is a fierce warrior with superhuman strength, an arsenal of medieval weapons and enormous wings. Taken together with her “Last of Us” role, the fierceness seems to be a pattern.

“It’s funny, because people see me and they’re like, What a small, cute little girl!” she said. “But I actually see myself as a very strong person. I see myself as an intimidating individual. So it’s going to be nice for people to maybe see me the way I see myself for once.”