The teenage star of Dino Dex took home the Young Entertainer Award for Best Leading Young Actor in a Television Series, a category that rewards stamina more than sparkle
Awards for young performers usually get filed under charming. A small statue, a nice photo, a new line in a bio. Every so often one lands on a kid who won it for something genuinely difficult, and the category becomes more interesting than the ceremony.
Juan Pablo Romero has won the Young Entertainer Award for Best Leading Young Actor in a Television Series for his work as Dex in Dino Dex. He is still a teenager, having started auditioning in 2022 at just ten years old. And the thing he was recognized for is not charm. It is load bearing.
What a Lead Actually Carries
There is a myth that children’s television is easy work because the tone is light. Ask anyone who has run a family series and they will tell you the opposite. A young lead sets the pace of every scene, matches energy across shooting days that may be filmed weeks apart, absorbs direction, and adjusts quickly, all while working within the carefully structured schedules required for young performers. The responsibility is substantial, especially for a lead carrying a series: the scenes, the story, and the rhythm of the production often depend on them.
Dino Dex runs to twenty six episodes and Romero is in all of them. The series, from Sinking Ship Entertainment, follows a young artist and explorer who studies dinosaurs through a magical field guide, and carries a real educational current beneath the adventure. That current only works if the person delivering it sounds like he believes it. Tone is the lead’s job, and tone is what this award category quietly measures.
The Franchise He Inherited
Dino Dex did not start from zero. It extends a lineage that already produced Dino Dan and Dino Dana, two shows with a devoted global audience and a house style fans notice the moment it slips. Stepping into that is closer to joining a band with a catalogue than starting one.
The series premiered in October 2024 on Amazon Kids+ and Prime Video, with broadcast partners including TVOKids, TFO and Knowledge Network, and reach into markets well past North America. Awards can spotlight a moment. Romero’s recognition speaks to the work of sustaining one. Across a full season, he carries a leading role episode after episode, bringing the same focus and commitment to a series that has found audiences around the world.
Before Dex, the Booth
The training happened somewhere less visible. Romero’s earliest professional credits came in voice work: Super Wings, Work It Out Wombats!, and Lyla in the Loop, the last two educational series seen widely across North America on platforms including PBS Kids.
Voice acting is the closest thing the business has to scales and drills. You cannot lean on a face. Timing, inflection, and the ability to make two characters sound like two people are the whole instrument. Actors who come up through the booth tend to arrive on camera with a sense of rhythm that is hard to teach later, and Romero’s ability to sustain a lead reads like a dividend from those sessions.
He built the on camera side in steps. A supporting role in the 2024 feature Please, After You gave him a first full production. A leading ensemble part in Moozoom, a platform used in classrooms for social and emotional learning, gave him his first real lead on camera. By the time Sinking Ship needed a Dex, he had already done a version of the job.
Then He Went Somewhere Much Darker
The award lands alongside a credit that has nothing to do with dinosaurs. 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 Caido, part of one of the rival families inside the film’s lethal game.
The room is a serious one. Samara Weaving returns as Grace, alongside Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nestor Carbonell, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood, David Cronenberg, and Kevin Durand. His directors have described a collaborator rather than a kid taking notes, willing to talk through motivation and bring ideas to the floor.
That combination is rare enough to name. Most young actors get sorted early into either the wholesome lane or the intense one. Romero is winning in the first while proving he can work in the second.
The Part the Trophy Does Not Show
Away from set he is a competitive table tennis player, a serious student, and a reader who has been through Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. He preps auditions like an assignment, with script analysis and specific choices rather than instinct. His family has been deliberate about what he watches, feeding him 1980s cartoons and films from several eras so his reference library runs wider than his own age bracket.
That habit shows up on screen. Actors who only watch what their peers watch tend to perform what their peers perform.
What Comes Next
The dinosaurs are not finished with him. The First Dinosaur, a feature length spinoff, is on the way with Romero back in the lead and cast from earlier Dino titles around him.
A win at this age is not a prediction. Plenty never convert. What makes this one worth logging is the shape of the work behind it: voice credits, a film debut, a classroom lead, a series he carried for a full season, a feature, and a hard turn into R rated horror, none of it resting on a single lucky break. The trophy says Best Leading Young Actor. The resume suggests he had been doing the leading part for a while already.