Wagner Moura’s riveting star turn in “The Secret Agent” made him the first Brazilian man nominated for an Academy Award for lead actor. So in addition to the usual congratulations from friends and family, Brazil itself took joy in the announcement. “It was a big thing in Brazil, which makes me so excited,” Moura says, sitting in a conference room at The Times after a photo shoot. “I’m so happy that Brazilians are embracing culture and art as something that they’re proud of, particularly this film and [international feature winner] ‘I’m Still Here’ last year, which was also a political film that takes place during the dictatorship.”
Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship lasted from 1964 to 1985. “The Secret Agent,” set primarily in 1977, centers on Moura’s character Marcelo, who goes into hiding because a villainous businessman wants to kill him.
“We call it a military dictatorship, but it was a civil military dictatorship,” Moura notes. “I like that the bad guy of our film is a businessman, because that’s exactly what happened there. All the big Brazilian newspapers supported the coup d’état. So did the so-called elite.” So did the U.S. government.
It was a more recent period of incipient authoritarianism that inspired the film, though. The rise of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president from 2019 to 2023, was met with disbelief and horror by many Brazilians who remembered the dictatorship, Moura and “Secret Agent” writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho among them. “Kleber and I were both very vocal against that particular government, and we both suffered the consequences of it,” Moura says. “That was what put us together on ‘The Secret Agent.’ It’s a film about someone sticking with the values that he has, and that’s how we felt.”
“We are very different people, but we see the role of an artist and the role of films and art in a very similar way,” he continues. “We think that art and politics merge, that they shouldn’t be separate. Even when you see a romantic comedy or an animation, if that touches you, transforms you, makes you think about your life, it is political for me.”
Marcelo, a widower whose real name is Armando, travels to the northeast city of Recife to escape the hit on him and reunite with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who’s living with his late wife’s parents. Searching for a way for them to escape the country to safety, he agrees to be interviewed by an activist who can provide him with fake papers.
Memory is a key element woven throughout the film. In flash forwards to the present day, we see a young researcher, Flavia (Laura Lufési), transcribing the interview tapes. “The way history is told is very important,” Moura notes, adding that now more than ever, “everything is upside down, especially with the fake news and so many crazy lies. That’s the scariest part of it all for me, the fact that the facts don’t matter anymore.”
The movie has an immersive period sensibility. “Kleber is a big fan of American films from the ’70s,” Moura says. “You can see that by the way he shoots on anamorphic lenses and the zooms, and you can feel [John] Carpenter, [Alan J.] Pakula, [Sam] Peckinpah, [Brian] De Palma.”
His first time working with his friend was a delight. “I was so happy to be back in Brazil after 12 years and to do something in my own language,” says Moura, who has lived in Los Angeles with his family for eight years and is perhaps best known in the U.S. for his work on the series “Narcos.” “I’m very proud of being from that region — I’m from Salvador, which is close to Recife.”
Marcelo hides out in a compound run by Dona Sebastiana, played by 78-year-old breakout star Tânia Maria. “The first thing that I shot in the film was the scene where she was showing me the apartment. And you can definitely see when the camera’s on me that I’m almost looking at everybody else [with a huge smile] like, ‘What is going on here? What is this?’ She’s just a jewel. I can’t even start telling you how big she is now in Brazil. In Carnival, there will be many people dressing up like her in costumes and [with] things like a cigarette.”
He goes on to praise the other actors. “Sometimes I felt like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ meeting many different people on my way to Oz. I had a chance to work with Udo Kier! And all those amazing Brazilian actors, most of them are not in the Brazilian star system of telenovelas.” In addition to its nominations for lead actor, international feature and best picture, the film also earned Gabriel Domingues a nomination in the inaugural casting category. “That was another great thing about this. Brazil is such a diverse country, with people from all over.”
Carnival plays out in the movie’s background, adding life and music as well as disguising crimes perpetrated by those in power. Elements of absurdism also swirl throughout, including a disembodied hairy leg that attacks people having sex in a park.
Turns out that “hairy leg” is real — at least the story behind it is. In Recife at that time, “journalists couldn’t write that the police were brutalizing people,” Moura explains, so they attributed such attacks to “the hairy leg,” until it became an urban legend.
He enjoys the film’s other mysteries. “Kleber doesn’t spoon-feed people. One thing that I like about this film is that it doesn’t answer all the questions. I love when Dona Sebastiana says, ‘I did three things in Italy and I will never tell what they are.’ But I really wanted to know what she did in Italy.”
One unusual choice presents a climactic murder only in a photo seen decades later, along with articles defaming the victim. “This is also a film about infamy, because he’s being persecuted so unfairly. He gets killed, and then they killed him again because they killed his reputation,” Moura notes. He compares the character’s fate to that of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot to death by federal agents, “and then lies were spread about them online. It’s so cruel, and so it’s killing the person twice. That increases the generational trauma. That’s something this film is also about, a kid that grew up believing that his father did something wrong, which he didn’t.”
In the final scenes, Moura plays the adult Fernando, who has no interest in hearing the tapes of his father that Flavia offers him. Moura played Fernando’s scenes on the last day of filming, without the usual rehearsal process. It was all too easy for him to drop into the role. “When I think about that character, I think about that child, about a scene that’s not in the film, where he’s waiting for his dad to go pick him up, and his dad never shows up.”
“The logic of the dictatorship is still very present in contemporary Brazil,” Moura says. He’s proud that when Bolsonaro led an attempted coup after losing the 2022 election, he was arrested, tried and sentenced to prison, along with his military co-conspirators — despite President Trump’s best efforts. “But Brazil is a crazy mix of progressiveness and everything that Bolsonaro represents. Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, for example. Bolsonaro doesn’t come from Mars. He’s deeply grounded in the history of the country.”
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