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    Isabela Merced Is Ready to Slay (and Not Just Zombies)

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    On a cool morning in late March, the 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 on Sunday, 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.Isabela Merced, left, and Bella Ramsey in a scene from the Season 2 premiere of “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOWill 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘The Last of Us’ Review: On the Road Again

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      Season 2 of HBO’s zombie drama begins with Joel and Ellie safe and settled. One guess how long that lasts.HBO’s video-game-inspired, postapocalyptic hit “The Last of Us” likes to cover all its zombie bases. The first season emphasized urban hellscapes — lots of cowering and running in the ruins of Boston, Kansas City and Salt Lake City — while moving toward the open spaces of Wyoming. Season 2, premiering Sunday, goes the other direction, starting out as a grisly western — stockaded town, horse patrols, waves of attackers — but moving back to the city, this time an emptied-out Seattle.Wherever it goes, though, “The Last of Us” remains (as my colleague James Poniewozik pointed out in his Season 1 review) a zombie tale that polishes and elaborates on the conventions of the genre but does not transcend them. The course of its action and the dynamics of its relationships run in familiar grooves, lubricated by generous applications of blood and goo.Where the show has differed from the genre standard is in the dramatic weight and screen time it devotes to those relationships, or, seen another way, in its sentimentality. (I say potahto.)Other zombie shows flesh out love, friendship and loyalty just enough to provide a little extra frisson when a character becomes lunch. “The Last of Us,” which was created and is still overseen by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, doesn’t reverse that equation — it still spends time, and a lot of HBO’s money, on elaborate scenes of mayhem, in close quarters or on broad canvases. But it really wants you to care. If the Hallmark Channel had a zombie drama, it might look like a PG version of “The Last of Us.”At the heart of the series, making the greatest demands on our emotions, is the Mutt and Jeff pairing of Joel (Pedro Pascal) — a hard case whose daughter was killed at the beginning of the show’s zombie-spawning fungal pandemic — and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager he met two decades later. Ellie, who would try the patience of adults far saintlier than Joel, happens to be immune to the fungus, and in Season 1 Joel reluctantly agreed to take her on a cross-country journey in pursuit of a cure. They emerged from the perilous, season-long road trip as each other’s surrogate family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Ice Spice, Brian Jordan Alvarez and More Breakout Stars of 2023

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      These eight performers and artists broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.Gutsy and offbeat, with an abundance of heart. The stars who rose to the top in 2023 shared a similar mentality: do it their own way and go full tilt without sacrificing emotion or authenticity. Here are eight artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans.TelevisionBella RamseyAs the TV landscape continues to fracture, one new show emerged as a bona fide phenomenon: “The Last of Us,” HBO’s stunningly heartfelt zombie apocalypse thriller. Given that its source material was a beloved, acclaimed 2013 video game that has sold over 20 million copies, the bar was extraordinarily high. The show’s debut season delivered, in large part because of the synergy between the duo at its center: Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, two characters who find themselves on a cross-country quest, dodging reanimated corpses to (hopefully) save the world.Ramsey, 20, who was born and raised in central England, offered a layered, tenacious, haunting performance as a teenager who is coming-of-age while being humanity’s possible last hope. They have been a working actor since they signed on to “Game of Thrones” at age 11, as the scene-stealing giant slayer Lyanna Mormont, and went on to have celebrated turns in the BBC/HBO adaptation of “His Dark Materials” and Lena Dunham’s 2022 period comedy, “Catherine Called Birdy.”For “The Last of Us,” Ramsey nailed a specific combination of contradictions — funny and quirky, but violent and rough — that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, its creators, were looking for. “There are few people better between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” Mazin told The New York Times.Ramsey’s performance earned them an Emmy nomination, for outstanding lead actress in a drama, joining the likes of established stars such as Keri Russell and Elisabeth Moss. “It’s only recently that I’ve accepted I am Ellie, and I can do it, and I am a good actor,” Ramsey told us.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      ‘Catherine Called Birdy’ Review: Ye Olde Lady Bird

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      Bella Ramsey plays a 13th century adolescent in Lena Dunham’s winning film.To flip through the pages of a 13th century manuscript, one might believe the medieval era was beleaguered by more snaky dragons and man-murdering bunnies than temperamental tween girls. Young women’s stories weren’t recorded — certainly not in their own hand, as literacy was low and paper costs were high — an absence that has prodded later generations to imagine the adolescent of the Middle Ages as demure and obedient, neither seen nor heard. Here comes “Catherine Called Birdy,” a headstrong comedy written for the screen and directed by Lena Dunham, to fill in that silence with a shriek.Birdy, played with zest by Bella Ramsey, storms into the frame baring her teeth and flinging mud pies. The 14-year-old daughter of a broke lord (Andrew Scott) and his oft-bedridden wife (Billie Piper), Birdy is mercurial, mulish and emphatically irritated by nearly everyone and everything in her shire. She logs her grievances in her diary, which riffs from Karen Kushman’s 1994 Newbery Medal-winning children’s novel. The film drops Kushman’s unromantic runner about pestilence (“Picked off 29 fleas today,” her Birdy writes) to focus on the girl’s passion for inventing curses (“Corpus bones!”) and her campaign to scuttle her father’s intention to save his estate by marrying his only surviving daughter to a flatulent creep she dubs Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye).Husbands, as seen here, are either too old (81!), too young (9!) or too selfish, in the case of Scott’s repugnantly weak Lord Rollo, who wasted the family money importing tigers and silken robes he wears open-chested with beads, as if presaging Lord Byron’s fashion sense six centuries sooner. No wonder the girl would prefer to suffer a saint’s gruesome tortures than live on as one more forsaken wife.Dunham sets out to make life in 1290 feel as vibrant as if Birdy was rocking the glitter eye shadow of “Euphoria” instead of drawstring underpants. Occasionally, the movie overplays its bid for modern relevance — it’s dubious that a medieval teen would be able to come out as gay with just a knowing look — and the soundtrack’s twee covers of girl power anthems are a warble too far. (No need to perform Elastica’s “Connection” on what sounds like a lute.) But Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous, and crams the corners of her movie with images of other female characters discreetly seizing their own moments of satisfaction — glimpses of joys which realize that it’s in the margins of a medieval tale where the best stuff happens.Catherine Called BirdyRated PG-13 for adult innuendo. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More