Will JonesFrom animated voices to a lead dinosaur series and a turn in a major horror sequel, the teenage performer keeps stretching his range
Some young actors find the camera. Juan Pablo Romero went looking for it. He began auditioning in 2022, when he was ten, after years of inventing characters and acting out stories at home. What looked at first like an overactive imagination turned out to be the early shape of a working career, one that now spans voice booths, classroom screens, family television, and a feature film aimed at a very different audience.
In a few short years he has gone from reading for parts to carrying a series. Here is how that happened.
Finding His Voice First
Romero’s first professional steps came through voice work, where a young actor learns the mechanics of performance without a camera in the room. He lent his voice to Super Wings, Work It Out Wombats!, and Lyla in the Loop, the latter two widely seen educational series that air across North America on platforms including PBS Kids and reach further through international broadcast partners.
Voice acting is unforgiving in a useful way. There is nowhere to hide behind expression or movement, so timing and inflection carry everything. Those early sessions gave Romero a feel for character differentiation and pacing that later showed up in his on camera work.
Stepping In Front of the Camera
His feature film debut arrived with Please, After You (2024), a supporting role that let him test screen presence and emotional control in a real production setting. He followed it with a leading ensemble part in Moozoom, a platform built for classrooms to support social and emotional learning. That project was his first significant lead in front of a camera, and by the accounts of those who worked with him he treated it like a professional: prepared, decisive about his choices, and comfortable under the lights.
Comfort in front of a camera is not a given for young performers. Many freeze or overplay. Romero seemed instead to settle into the work.
Becoming Dex
The turning point came when Sinking Ship Entertainment cast him as Dex, the lead of Dino Dex. The series extends the studio’s long running dinosaur franchise, the same world that produced Dino Dan and Dino Dana, and follows a curious young artist and explorer who studies dinosaurs through a magical field guide.
Dino Dex premiered in October 2024 on Amazon Kids+ and Prime Video, with broadcast reach through partners in Canada and beyond, running to twenty six episodes. As the title character, Romero anchors both the storytelling and the gentle educational current that runs beneath it. Leading a series at his age is a real test of stamina and consistency, and the show’s reception suggests he passed it.
The franchise is not finished with him either. A feature length spinoff, The First Dinosaur, wrapped production in 2025 and is on the way, with Romero again in the lead alongside cast members from the earlier Dino titles.
A Darker Turn
Then came a sharp left. Romero appears in Ready or Not: Here I Come, the 2026 sequel to the 2019 horror hit, directed by Matt Bettinelli Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence for Searchlight Pictures. He plays Felipe El Caído, part of one of the rival families at the center of the film’s deadly game.
The ensemble around him is formidable. Samara Weaving returns as Grace, joined by Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Néstor Carbonell, Elijah Wood, David Cronenberg, and Kevin Durand. For a young actor who built his name on warm educational fare, stepping into a darker, R rated world is a deliberate stretch, and the kind of credit that signals range rather than typecasting.
The Person Behind the Roles
Away from set, Romero reads like a kid who happens to work. He is a competitive table tennis player, a committed student, and a reader who has worked through the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings series. He approaches auditions the way a craftsperson approaches a problem, with script analysis, character work, and clear performance choices rather than instinct alone.
His family has also been intentional about his film education, exposing him to cartoons, sitcoms, and movies across several decades. That mix of older and newer storytelling gives him a wider vocabulary of characters and styles to draw from, which tends to show in performers who watch widely.
What Comes Next
The trajectory is unusual for how steady it is. Voice credits, a film debut, a classroom lead, a series of his own, a spinoff feature, and a supporting role in a major studio sequel, all before most performers his age have finished a single season of anything. None of it rests on a single lucky break.
What makes Romero worth watching is not just the length of the resume but the spread of it. He moves between mediums and tones without losing the through line, which is a young actor who keeps showing up prepared and keeps getting asked back. With the trajectory he has established, the dinosaurs may ultimately be remembered as the starting point of a career whose full story has yet to be told.