Why Dina From The Last Of Us Season 2 Looks So Familiar

This article contains a discussion of mental health.

In "The Last of Us Part II" — the sequel to the massively popular 2013 game "The Last of Us" that released in 2020, both courtesy of Naughty Dog — we meet Dina, an impulsive but skilled fighter and survivor who's best friends with Ellie, one of the game's main playable characters. In the series, Ellie is played by Bella Ramsey, and we get to know her pretty well throughout the first season as she travels the country, which has been ravaged by a cordyceps virus that turns infected people into bloodthirsty zombies, alongside Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal). In that first season, the two also find time to visit Jackson, a fiercely protected settlement full of survivors that happens to house Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), which is where Dina also resides in the video game.

On-screen, Dina is played by Isabela Merced, a formidable young actress who's racked up a seriously impressive resumé after starting her Hollywood career on the Nickelodeon show "100 Things to Do Before High School" (which ran from 2014 to 2016). From 2014 to 2017, Merced also voiced the character Kate in "Dora and Friends: Into the City!" (a spin-off of the animated hit "Dora the Explorer"), and in 2017, she appeared in her first big-budget project thanks to "Transformers: The Last Knight." After her supporting turn in 2018's sequel "Sicario: Day of the Soldado" as the daughter of a cartel boss, Merced was earning rave reviews from critics, which helped kickstart career in a big way. Now that she's playing a huge role in "The Last of Us" season 2, here's where you've seen Merced — who, again, plays Dina — on-screen before.

The same year that she appeared in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado," Isabela Merced also starred in "Instant Family," a dramatic comedy directed by Sean Anders ("That's My Boy," "Daddy's Home") and written by Anders and John Morris ("Daddy's Home," "We're the Millers"). When Pete and Ellie Wagner, played by Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne, decide to adopt after years of choosing to remain childless — and when they join a foster care network and attend an adoption event, they end up instantly connecting with a 15-year-old named Lizzie (Merced). There's a catch, though. Lizzie's mother is fully unable to take care of any of her kids, meaning that Lizzie is a package deal with her siblings, 10-year-old Juan (Gustavo Escobar) and 6-year-old Lita (Julianna Gamiz), so Pete and Ellie take all three children home with them.

Obviously, bringing three kids into a brand new home and familial situation is tough, and there are some serious growing pains between the Wagners and their new, well, "instant family." Things get particularly complicated when Lizzie, Juan, and Lita's mom Carla (Joselin Reyes) gets out of prison and comes to visit, disrupting the new lives her children are trying to build and lead, and this all builds to a point where Pete and Ellie realize they have to fight for their new family. "Instant Family" is an unexpectedly touching film, and Merced, as the oldest sibling trying to keep her blended family together, is excellent; honestly, she's the heart of the entire story.

The sixth "Father of the Bride" movie overall — a remake of the 1991 and 1995 films led by Steve Martin, which in turn were remakes of the 1950s films with Spencer Tracy — came in 2022 thanks to HBO, which premiered their take on this classic tale on their proprietary streamer (now simply called Max). This time, the titular role is Andy Garcia's Billy Herrera, a successful architect living in Miami with his wife Ingrid (Gloria Estefan), and the couple has two daughters: Sofia ("Hit Man" standout Adria Arjona) and Cora (Isabela Merced). Sofia recently graduated from law school when the story begins — she's the older sibling, and Merced's Cora dreams of being a fashion designer — and amidst Ingrid and Billy's marital troubles, Sofia comes home to visit and reveals that she's set to marry another lawyer, Adan Castillo (Diego Boneta), in just one month, which sends Billy into a full-blown spiral.

Because Cora isn't the titular bride, Merced has less to do than, say, Arjona or Garcia, but she still gets to be a part of many of the movie's big emotional beats. Not only does Cora handmake Sofia's stunning wedding dress — and dresses for all of the bridesmaids to boot — but she's the one who overhears Billy discussing his impending divorce from Ingrid and tells the rest of the family, shocking and surprising everyone just before the wedding takes place. This is a "Father of the Bride" movie, though, so don't worry; it all ends happily.

"Rosaline" was a pretty big role for Isabela Merced, but there's also an interesting twist here with regards to "The Last of Us." In the 2022 Hulu original, Kaitlyn Dever plays the titular role of Rosaline, and any English Literature major worth their salt knows that Rosaline just so happens to be the girl that Romeo of "Romeo and Juliet" is in love with before he meets his fair Juliet. So who plays Juliet in "Rosaline," then? That would be Merced!

Director Karen Maine's twist on this classic material finds cousins Rosaline and Juliet at odds as they compete for Romeo's (Kyle Allen) affections, with each girl plotting in turn (Juliet eventually realizes that Rosaline and Romeo were an item before she even met the guy, inspiring her to fight back). Along the way, though, Rosaline struggles with her attraction to another suitor, Dario Penza (Sean Teale), and as these two start a romance, the plot of William Shakespeare's classic play unfolds in the background. This time, though, Rosaline and Dario prevent the major miscommunication that — centuries-old spoiler alert — kills the young lovers in the play, and as Romeo and Juliet sail away into the sunset and struggle to find any common ground after their whirlwind romance, Rosaline and Dario are the ones who truly live happily ever after. Okay, so what does this have to do with "The Last of Us?" Merced, obviously, plays Dina in the second season ... and her former on-screen cousin Dever joins her as Abby, another new Season 2 player.

"Madame Web" is a patently stupid movie — but Isabela Merced isn't half bad in it, all things considered! In this ham-fisted attempt by Sony to create a universe centered around the character of Spider-Man despite the character being a mainstay in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we're introduced to EMT Cassandra "Cassie" Webb (Dakota Johnson), whose mother infamously died while researching spiders in the Amazon (or however that line goes) and who's living a somewhat normal life before an ambulance crash gives her unexpected powers. Specifically, she can see visions of the future, and when she manages to see explorer turned millionaire Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim, who, based on the fact that Ezekiel's lines are delivered almost exclusively via ADR, was apparently never on set during filming) kill three teenage girls, she springs into action.

Those teenage girls — Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazon, and Mattie Franklin, who are played by Sydney Sweeney, Merced, and Celeste O'Connor — are future Spider-Women, and even though the movie keeps showing us a shot of them in their supersuits, they never actually don them during the film. The whole enterprise is, quite frankly, a now-famous mess, but Merced, Johnson, Sweeney, and Franklin do the best with the meager material they're given. Luckily, Sony's Spider-Man Universe, or the SSU, may not have any future installments coming as of this writing — especially after "Kraven the Hunter" bombed at the box office — so hopefully Merced won't have to return to this particular franchise.

In 2024, Isabela Merced took on her biggest role yet in Fede Álvarez's entry into the long-running "Alien" franchise, titled "Alien: Romulus." The overall movie is led by Cailee Spaeny ("Priscilla," "Civil War") as Marie Raines "Rain" Carradine, an orphaned Jackson's Star colonist who is trying to escape a newly forced work contract. To do so, she seeks help from her android "brother" Andy (David Johnson), her ex-boyfriend Tyler Harrison (Archie Renaux), his pregnant sister Kay Harrison (Merced), and Kay and Tyler's android-hating cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn). They steal a ship and pilot it to an abandoned Weyland-Yutani space station that's split into two parts, Romulus and Remus — named for the fraternal founders of Rome — and look for equipment for a much longer journey.

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the "Alien" franchise knows there's weird stuff here surrounding pregnancy and birth, so alarm bells should have gone off when you learned that Merced's character Kay is pregnant. Naturally, there's a deeply disturbing scene that was apparently too gross for even the cast members to watch directly where Kay, who's been hunted and attacked by a xenomorph, births a horrifyingly mutated human-xenomorph hybrid. It's a great horror showcase for Merced, at the very least ... though her character likely won't appear in future "Alien" movies based on her fate in this one.

John Green is one of the most popular young-adult novelists in the entire genre, and a ton of his books, including "The Fault in Our Stars" and "Paper Towns," have been adapted for both the big and small screen. In 2024, his 2017 book "Turtles All the Way Down" got the adaptation treatment — and in this one, Isabela Merced takes center stage as 16-year-old Aza Holmes, a girl struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety who's desperate to track down a reclusive billionaire ... who happens to be a fugitive. That billionaire also happens to be the father of her childhood friend Davis, played by Felix Mallard in the film, and sparks fly between the two teens despite Aza's deep fears of contracting a fatal disease.

A Max original, "Turtles All the Way Down" flew somewhat under the radar when it released in May 2024, but it was decently well-received by critics and was, if nothing else, an excellent showcase for Merced's talents. On Sunday, April 13 at 9 P.M. EST on Max and HBO, you can see Merced as Dina in Season 2 of "The Last of Us."

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.