Early Life

Navarrette was born in Tucson to a family with Mexican and Australian roots: her father is Mexican, while her mother is Australian. That mixed heritage later gave particular resonance to her work on Superman & Lois, where the Cushing family’s Mexican American background and original Cortez surname became part of the story rather than an incidental character detail.

She attended Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach, a coastal community in San Diego County. Unlike performers whose childhoods are documented through years of studio productions, Navarrette reached wider audiences near the end of her teens. Her early screen credits were modest, allowing her to learn the practical rhythms of production before joining two series with large, vocal audiences.

That timing matters. She was not introduced as the center of a franchise or promoted through a highly managed child-star narrative. Instead, she entered established ensembles and had to define characters through limited screen time. The skill became evident in 13 Reasons Why, where she arrived during the show’s final season carrying the history of a character who was no longer alive. It became even more important on Superman & Lois, where intimate family scenes regularly had to hold their own against the machinery of superhero television.

Family

Parents

• Her father is Mexican; his name and occupation are not broadly documented.
• Her mother is Australian; her name and occupation are not broadly documented.

Career

Navarrette’s first widely seen turning point came in 2020, a year in which she appeared in both a globally discussed Netflix series and a Sundance-selected feature. The two projects asked for different kinds of restraint.

In the fourth and final season of 13 Reasons Why, she played Estela de la Cruz, the younger sister of Montgomery de la Cruz. Monty had committed brutal acts during the series and was subsequently killed off screen; he was also blamed for Bryce Walker’s murder as part of a cover-up devised by the principal characters. Estela therefore entered Liberty High carrying a name that meant something to nearly everyone around her.

The role could easily have functioned as a narrative instrument designed to expose the cover-up. Navarrette instead played Estela as someone trying to understand a brother whose cruelty she could neither erase nor fully reconcile with the person she had known. Estela’s connection with Tyler Down, one of Monty’s victims, made the material especially delicate. Their scenes placed grief, accountability and the limits of inherited guilt in the same room. Navarrette joined a series already surrounded by debate about its handling of trauma, but she brought a comparatively quiet perspective to its final reckoning.

The same year, she appeared as Ellie in Wander Darkly, writer-director Tara Miele’s nonlinear romantic drama starring Sienna Miller and Diego Luna. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before receiving a wider release through Lionsgate. Its structure moves through memory, perception and uncertainty after a traumatic event, requiring the supporting cast to fit into a story that deliberately withholds a stable sense of time. For a young actor, it was valuable company: Miller and Luna are performers known for conveying complicated emotional histories without overexplaining them.

Navarrette’s defining television opportunity arrived with Superman & Lois. Her casting as Sarah Cushing was announced in 2020, before the series premiered on The CW in February 2021. The show began with a familiar comic-book proposition—Superman and Lois Lane returning to Smallville with their teenage sons—but distinguished itself by paying unusual attention to mortgages, marriages, mental health and the accumulated disappointments of adulthood.

Sarah was the daughter of Lana Lang and Kyle Cushing and the older sister of Sophie. She became a friend and romantic interest for Jordan Kent, the anxious son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane who was beginning to develop Kryptonian abilities. Yet Sarah was never simply the non-powered girlfriend waiting beside the superhero story. The pilot established that she had survived a suicide attempt and was receiving treatment for depression. Her frankness with Jordan created an immediate connection between two teenagers accustomed to feeling that something inside them was difficult to explain.

Navarrette’s performance helped keep that relationship from becoming an idealized high-school romance. Sarah could be compassionate and impatient, perceptive about Jordan’s pain and careless with his trust. She pursued music, questioned the future available to her in Smallville and reacted to the collapse of her parents’ marriage. Some of her decisions divided viewers, particularly when the series complicated her relationship with Jordan. Navarrette’s task was not to make every decision agreeable. It was to preserve Sarah’s right to be as inconsistent as the show’s male teenagers.

The Cushing household also gave Superman & Lois a second family through which to examine Smallville. Lana’s history with Clark connected the series to Superman mythology, but Kyle and Sarah represented residents whose lives were shaped by the town rather than by Krypton. As the series explored the family’s Mexican heritage, the Cortez name became significant. That development allowed Navarrette to play a young woman considering not only where she wanted to go, but what parts of her family history she wanted to carry with her.

Superman & Lois ran for four seasons, concluding in 2024 with a shortened final season. Its production demands shifted over time, and its last chapter operated with a reduced regular cast, but Sarah remained part of the emotional geography the series had constructed around Smallville. Navarrette had spent the transition from her late teens into her early twenties playing a character making a similar passage.

The series also placed her within an unusual corner of superhero entertainment. Superman & Lois arrived through The CW, home of the interconnected Arrowverse, but eventually established that its characters inhabited a separate continuity. That separation gave the writers room to build their own Kent and Lang families without remaining tied to every event in the network’s earlier programs. For Navarrette, it meant working in a franchise with extensive mythology while portraying a character whose most important battles were recognizably human.

Her career so far is not a long list of interchangeable credits. It is a small group of projects with demanding subject matter: suicide and recovery, sexual violence and its aftermath, family rupture, memory and adolescent identity. The next meaningful step will be determined less by the size of a franchise than by whether a role gives her the same opportunity to locate a private life inside a public story.

Television

• 13 Reasons Why (2020) — Estela de la Cruz
• Superman & Lois (2021–2024) — Sarah Cushing, later associated with the Cortez family name

Filmography

• Wander Darkly (2020) — Ellie

Current Projects

• No officially confirmed Saturday Night Live hosting appearance, project titled Obsession or Marvel Cinematic Universe role as Rogue should be attributed to Navarrette without announcements from the relevant networks, studios or filmmakers.
• Superman & Lois completed its fourth and final season in 2024, closing Navarrette’s longest-running screen role to date.

Interesting Facts

• Navarrette’s paternal heritage is Mexican, while her maternal heritage is Australian.
• She was born in Arizona but attended Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach, California, near the United States–Mexico border.
• Her first two major projects to reach broad audiences arrived in the same year: 13 Reasons Why and Wander Darkly were both released in 2020.
• She joined 13 Reasons Why only for its final season, meaning Estela had to make an impression inside a story with three seasons of existing relationships and conflicts.
• Estela de la Cruz is the sister of Montgomery de la Cruz, but Navarrette approached the character from the position of a surviving family member rather than simply reproducing Monty’s antagonism.
• Estela’s friendship with Tyler Down carries unusual dramatic weight because Tyler had been violently assaulted by her brother.
• Wander Darkly premiered at Sundance, giving Navarrette an early feature credit in one of the American independent film calendar’s most closely watched programs.
• Her Wander Darkly co-stars Sienna Miller and Diego Luna had both moved between independent films and major franchises, a route that offers an instructive model for a young actor.
• Navarrette was announced as part of Superman & Lois in 2020, nearly a year before viewers saw its first episode.
• Sarah Cushing’s mental-health history is established in the Superman & Lois pilot, immediately giving the character concerns separate from her connection to Jordan Kent.
• Although Superman & Lois emerged from The CW’s superhero lineup, the series eventually confirmed that it was set on an Earth separate from the main Arrowverse continuity.
• The Cushing family’s original Cortez surname became part of the series’ discussion of Mexican American identity and assimilation.
• Superman & Lois was produced in British Columbia, requiring its cast to create an American small-town world largely through Canadian locations and purpose-built sets.
• Navarrette remained with Superman & Lois for its full four-season run, giving Sarah a longer continuous arc than any of her previous characters.
• Despite online-style claims connecting her to Rogue, Marvel has not officially announced Navarrette as the MCU’s version of the X-Men character.
• There is likewise no established Saturday Night Live episode record documenting a Navarrette hosting debut.

Why ShowBiz Selected This Entertainer

Navarrette was proposed as this week’s Featured Entertainer because of a purported Saturday Night Live debut, a claimed role in Obsession and an alleged Marvel casting as Rogue. Those assertions are not supported by reliable official records and cannot responsibly serve as the factual basis of a profile.

The attention nevertheless provides a useful reason to examine the actress behind the circulating headline. Navarrette has already completed a four-season run in the Superman television canon, contributed to the difficult final chapter of 13 Reasons Why and appeared in a Sundance drama with two internationally recognized actors. Her work shows a preference—or at least an early aptitude—for characters living with consequences rather than merely delivering exposition. At 13 Reasons Why’s Liberty High and Superman & Lois’s Smallville, she made inherited histories feel immediate. That documented record, not an unconfirmed franchise rumor, is why she remains an entertainer to watch.

Watch Next

• Superman & Lois — Begin with the pilot to see how quickly Navarrette establishes Sarah’s emotional history and rapport with Jordan Kent.
• 13 Reasons Why, Season 4 — Navarrette’s Estela offers a family member’s perspective on Montgomery de la Cruz and the damage left behind after his death.
• Wander Darkly — A more formally adventurous project that places Navarrette within Tara Miele’s fragmented study of love, memory and trauma.
• Superman & Lois, final season — The conclusion shows how Smallville’s younger generation fits into the series’ larger meditation on family and time.