Gabriel Luna, the actor who built a career one step behind the lead

Gabriel Luna

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 5, 1982 Austin, Texas, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Terminator: Dark Fate, Temple Grandin, Freeheld
Awards	Austin Critics Table

One way to read Gabriel Luna’s career is to count the projects meant to make him a star that did not survive. A cable drama built around him as an undercover agent posing as a soccer player lasted a single season. A network crime series with him among its leads was pulled after three episodes. A Marvel series that would have given him his own show was dropped before it reached the screen. A Terminator film that cast him as the new killing machine lost so much money that its planned sequels disappeared. The actor left standing at the end of that list is busier than he has ever been, and better used, usually one step behind someone else.

That position suits him more than the billing ever did. As Tommy Miller, Joel’s younger brother in HBO’s The Last of Us, Luna plays a man shaped by loyalty and by the choices of the person beside him, and the part has become the most visible of his career. It is a supporting role in the plain sense. It is also the role in which a wide audience finally saw what Austin theatre critics had noticed long before: an actor who can make warmth look like a form of stubbornness.

Gabriel Isaac Luna was born on December 5, 1982, in Austin, Texas. His father died before he was born, and his mother raised him. At St. Edward’s University in Austin he made his stage debut as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, and he graduated with a fine arts degree in 2005. He stayed in the city’s theatre scene, co-founding the Paper Chairs company and taking on heavy material: Sergei Maxudov in a stage version of Bulgakov’s Black Snow, the title role in Orestes, Clov in Beckett’s Endgame. Those three performances won him the Austin Critics Table award for best lead actor in 2010.

His screen career started the year he left university, with the drama Fall to Grace at South by Southwest, followed by voice work in the video game BlackSite: Area 51 and small television parts in Prison Break, Touch and NCIS: Los Angeles. Richard Linklater gave him a small, uncredited role in Bernie, the Texas-set black comedy with Jack Black, and he carried the lead in the independent drama Dance with the One.

The first real bet on him as a leading man came from the El Rey Network, which cast him as Tony Bravo in Matador, a series from Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman about an undercover agent who becomes a professional soccer player to bring down a billionaire. It premiered in July 2014 and was cancelled after 13 episodes. A year later ABC launched Wicked City, a hunt for a serial killer on the Sunset Strip, with Luna as detective Paco Contreras; the network pulled it after its third episode and the rest ended up on Hulu. Between the two he played Miguel Gilb, a former lover of Taylor Kitsch’s character, in the second season of True Detective, and a border patrol agent in Transpecos, a desert thriller that premiered at South by Southwest in 2016.

Marvel then handed him Robbie Reyes, the Ghost Rider who drives a burning car instead of riding a motorcycle, for the fourth season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in 2016. The role brought a Teen Choice nomination and, in May 2019, the announcement of his own Ghost Rider series on Hulu. Hulu dropped it that September. Weeks later came Terminator: Dark Fate, directed by Tim Miller with James Cameron producing, in which Luna played the Rev-9, a machine that can split into two bodies, sent to hunt a young woman in Mexico City. He was the franchise’s first Latino Terminator, and he built the character as a predator who passes easily for a polite man.

That film is where the pattern turns hard. Terminator: Dark Fate opened to about $29 million in North America, The Hollywood Reporter estimated losses of more than $120 million for its backers, and the new trilogy it was meant to launch was shelved. None of these collapses was a verdict on Luna alone. Networks cancel shows and studios misjudge franchises. Taken together, though, they gave him an awkward reputation: an actor chosen again and again to carry something, then left with nothing to carry. The parts that lasted were narrower and shared, and they asked him to support a story rather than sell it.

HBO cast him as Tommy opposite Pedro Pascal in April 2021. He appeared as a guest in the first season in 2023, in the episode where Joel and Ellie reach the settlement in Jackson, and became a series regular in the second season in 2025, when Joel’s death moves the story’s centre of gravity. Around it he took the Netflix action comedy FUBAR, as the arms dealer Boro opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, the science fiction horror film The Astronaut with Kate Mara, which premiered at South by Southwest in 2025, and Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, playing Detective Rafael Tovar, one of the investigators who closed in on Gacy, opposite Michael Chernus.

This autumn he arrives twice inside ten days. The second season of The Terminal List, released on Prime Video on October 21, 2026, gives him a recurring role as Freddy Strain, a former SEAL Team 6 senior chief now working for the CIA’s Ground Branch, whose belief that Chris Pratt‘s James Reece is still alive pulls Reece back into the fight. On October 30 the second season of Dexter: Resurrection begins on Paramount+, with Luna as a guest star playing Ray Ballard, a serial killer known as the Sleepy-Eyed Stranger, one of the murderers Michael C. Hall’s Dexter has to face in a season that also features Brian Cox, Dan Stevens and Uma Thurman.

Away from sets, Luna has been married since February 2011 to the Romanian actress Smaranda Ciceu, and the couple live in Los Angeles.

He spent much of this year in Vancouver filming the third season of The Last of Us, which HBO is expected to release in 2027, with Luna back as Tommy. Also waiting is Baton, the soccer drama that marks Danny Ramirez’s debut as a director, with Édgar Ramírez, Eugenio Derbez and Rosario Dawson in the cast. Twelve years after Matador, Luna is back in a soccer story, this time as part of an ensemble, which is where his career has done its best work.

Featured Films

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) — The Astronaut (2025) — as Mark

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