Samantha Lorraine, the gymnast who became Dora and is already aiming for the dark

Samantha Lorraine

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 11, 2007 Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation	Actress
Known for	You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado
Awards	Kidscreen Awards 2026

The Lorraine in Samantha Lorraine isn’t her last name. Her full name is Samantha Lorraine Luis, and she was raised by Cuban-American parents in Miami — performing under a middle name that reads, in Hollywood terms, as carefully neutral. The gymnastics started early. So did the dance. Acting arrived later, not as ambition so much as a natural extension of a discipline already pointed toward performance: the body trained for movement finding its way into characters who moved through something.

Her first professional work was Kid Stew, a PBS children’s variety show that launched in 2020, when she was twelve. The same year she appeared on three episodes of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, the AMC spinoff, playing young Hope Bennett — enough of a dramatic context to establish that she could hold a frame without the scaffolding of a comedy format. Neither project announced her arrival. They were the specific kind of early career that looks, in hindsight, like deliberate preparation for whatever came next, even if it wasn’t quite that intentional at the time.

What came next was You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, the 2023 Netflix comedy directed by Sammi Cohen. Lorraine played Lydia Rodriguez Katz, the best friend and quiet rival to Stacy Friedman, played by Sunny Sandler. The film was built around the Sandler family — Adam Sandler producing and appearing as Stacy’s father, Idina Menzel as her mother — and Lorraine’s role was the kind that requires genuine tact: the best friend who secretly likes the same boy, whose loyalty frays, whose own feelings are running just under the story’s surface without ever being allowed to dominate it. She made it work cleanly. The film landed well on Netflix, and Lorraine’s name landed differently after it than before.

The Dora casting, announced in 2024, rewired the question her career was asking. She became the sixth actress to portray Dora Márquez on screen, stepping into a character that had spent two decades teaching pre-school children to count in Spanish and solve puzzles with active audience participation — the animated version of a classroom, scaled to television. Alberto Belli directed the live-action reboot; it arrived on Paramount+ and Nickelodeon on July 2, 2025. What distinguished Lorraine’s version from earlier iterations was physical. She performed her own gymnastics sequences and stunt work, the years of training visible on screen as something other than metaphor — the body shaped for precise movement doing that specific thing, in costume, in the Amazon jungle set, at speed.

The critical reading of the franchise, however, runs into a real complication here. The original Dora the Explorer was built around a specific cultural and educational argument: bilingual, Latino-centered, structured around a child’s active participation rather than passive viewing. The 2019 film with Isabela Merced had already pivoted that premise toward adventure-action, effectively trading the classroom for the genre. Lorraine’s 2025 version extended that pivot. The cartoon’s foundational dynamic — Dora addressing the audience, waiting for answers, repeating the lesson until it stuck — is largely absent from both live-action versions. What’s present instead is a physically confident young Latina actress headlining a family adventure film, performing her own stunts, anchoring a franchise. That isn’t a diminished thing. It is a different thing than what the animation was.

Night Comes is a different argument altogether. Announced in 2024 with Dafne Keen attached as co-star, the project marks the feature directorial debut of actor Jay Hernandez. Its premise — two sisters surviving a cataclysmic event and navigating what remains of a world in collapse — draws explicitly from Bird Box and The Descent. Filming was scheduled for Vancouver in late summer 2024. A release date had not been confirmed as of June 2026. What the project signals, regardless of when it arrives, is that the team around Lorraine has already begun making the turn that young actresses in the family-franchise lane typically spend years engineering: from beloved girl-next-door toward material with atmospheric weight, genre stakes, and a co-star whose own trajectory — Dafne Keen’s arc from Logan to His Dark Materials — gives some indication of what a version of that turn can look like when it works.

She was nominated for Best Acting at the 2026 Kidscreen Awards. She is nineteen years old. The question her career is building toward isn’t yet answerable — but it is, at this early point, the right question to be building toward.

Tags: actors, actresses, Adam Sandler, Cuban-American actresses, Dafne Keen, Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado

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