Anthony Ramos is taking the lead in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
For the last 15 years, the Transformers movie franchise has had a handful of leading men and women that have been caught at the center of an intergalactic war between the Autobots and the Decepticons. From Shia LaBeouf to Mark Wahlberg to Hailee Steinfeld, each one has brought a particular skill set to their roles.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts sees Ramos, best known for his roles in the musical film In the Heights and in the Broadway version of Hamilton, in the seventh installment of the blockbuster series. It’s also the first movie since 2018’s refined action flick Bumblebee, starring Steinfeld.
In Rise of the Beasts, Ramos plays Noah, a Brooklyn-based, ex-military electronics expert, who comes across a new set of Transformers, which include some of the characters from Transformers: Beast Wars, an animated TV series and video games from the 1990s.
In the first official trailer for the film, viewers are introduced to one of the robot animals, Optimus Primal, who can transform into a gorilla when it is in beast mode. Other beasts that show up in the trailer include a rhinoceros named Rhinox, a cheetah named Cheetor, and a Peregrine falcon named Airazor.
“Cheetor was always my favorite from Beast Wars,” Ramos, 31, told Remezcla during an interview this week. “He’s No. 1. He was always swaggy, funny [and] fast. He was always the coolest one to me.”
At one point in the trailer, Ramos even gets behind the wheel of a Porsche, although he admits that never got to drive it during filming. They left the stunt driving to the stunt drivers – in the actual movie, at least. “I was doing stunt driving training with the stunt coordinator, [but] the kind of stunts we were doing with the car, they needed a [professional] stunt driver.”
Anthony Ramos could’ve fooled us. He looks like a natural inside the sports car. He’ll get to show audiences what else he can do on the big screen when Transformers: Rise of the Beasts hits theaters on June 9, 2023.
