The stakes are high for the characters that Brazilian actor Wagner Moura takes on.
Caught in the grip of challenging sociopolitical backdrops, his magnetic and brooding men — whether bold authority figures, conflicted everyday guys, notorious outlaws or those in positions of power — represent an affront to the status quo. And so does he.
“Regarding injustice, I’m usually explosive and that reflects in the kind of characters that I play,” Moura tells me sitting at Neon’s offices on a rainy Los Angeles afternoon in November. “There’s this energy and this will to break s— down in a lot of them.”
Moura has just arrived back in L.A., where he spends most of his time with his three children and wife, photographer Sandra Delgado, after concluding a run of “A Trial – After An Enemy of the People” on stage in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. The play is a modern-day update to Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” conceived by Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy.
His theater engagement overlapped with the fall festivals he attended to present “The Secret Agent,” a Brazilian thriller set in the city of Recife during the 1970s, when the country was under a military dictatorship.
In the genre-bending period knockout from Kleber Mendonça Filho — one of Brazil’s leading filmmakers — Moura plays Armando, a grieving widower on the run who joins a community of people hiding from their pasts in trying times. Under a new name, he works toward finding an escape for him and his young son, but the powerful bigot he stood up against in his former life as a scientist is getting closer to finding him. A simple man must become a stealth operative in order to survive.
“I love that this is not a film about someone who’s trying to overthrow the government — he’s just a guy who sticks with his values, with who he is,” Moura says about his part. His salt-and-pepper short hair and beard confer an air of seasoned, handsome ruggedness.
Moura, 49, has thus far amassed a body of work that includes the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in the Netflix hit series “Narcos,” a fearless Reuters journalist in the dystopian “Civil War” and diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello in the biopic “Sergio.”
“I don’t want to be the Che Guevara of film,” Moura says, aware of the connective tissue of a career still in ascent. “I gravitate towards things that are political but I like being an actor more than anything else.”
For his simmering performance in “The Secret Agent” (opening Friday), Moura won the lead actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Mendonça Filho also received the directing prize. Their acclaimed crime drama has been selected to represent Brazil at the Oscars — and its chances are good. (It just added two awards from the New York Critics Circle.)
“Wagner is an incredibly intelligent person who has an understanding of life, of society, of human behavior,” Mendonça Filho says via Zoom from New York. “Actors find wonderful ways of representing life, and that’s what he does. [There was] not a lot of directing from me, because we had been talking for so long about the film, the role, about the historic moment of the world and the country, about alcohol and smoking, about talking to children and talking to people in general.”
Moura and Mendonça Filho met for the first time at Cannes in 2005, when the actor was there with his gritty love triangle “Lower City.” At the time, Mendonça Filho was both a film critic covering the festival and a budding filmmaker with a short in competition.
Learning that they were both originally from Brazil’s northeast — Moura from the state of Bahia and Mendonça Filho from Pernambuco — served as an immediate point of connection. A glaring cultural, racial and economic separation exists between the nation’s geographical north and south, the latter the wealthiest and whitest region of Brazil’s massive territory.
“There is a divide, which is quite complex to explain, so when you get to meet an actor and he comes from the northeast, it means something,” says Mendonça Filho.
“As an actor, back in the ’90s, it was like: There’s no way I’m going to work on television,” Moura says. “Because the kind of characters that actors from the northeast would play on TV were stereotypes, like the doorman. If you spoke with a particular accent, there was no way.”
The two crossed paths over the years and expressed a desire to work together. But it was their shared outspokenness during the regime of former president Jair Bolsonaro, recently sentenced to 27 years in prison, that drew them closer. Their public statements made them targets of the country’s virulent right wing.
“That put us on a special pedestal for the fascists in Brazil,” says Mendonça Filho. “We ended up calling each other often and saying, ‘How are you dealing with this?’ And we became brothers, just talking about the whole situation.”
“We both suffered the consequences,” Moura recalls. His directorial debut, “Marighella,” a political drama about Carlos Marighella, the Black Brazilian writer-turned-revolutionary, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019 but didn’t open in Brazil until 2021. “I had my film censored,” he says. “They managed to make it impossible to release it.”
For Moura, “The Secret Agent” represented a cinematic homecoming after not starring in a Brazilian film for over a decade. Bolsonaro’s administration, the COVID-19 pandemic and commitments abroad prevented him from taking on a major acting job in his country and in his native language.
Mendonça Filho admits he initially worried if Moura, after so many years working away from Brazil, would bring some of the “Where’s my trailer?” attitude people assume exists in Hollywood. “He didn’t,” the director says. “He’s intelligent enough to adapt to each project.”
Moura has never gone Hollywood, even though he’s found success in English-language films and TV series since he first crossed over with the 2013 sci-fi epic “Elysium,” acting alongside Matt Damon and Diego Luna.
“I had an agent here who was like, ‘You do this to get that,’ and I was like, ‘That’s not my thing,’” Moura remembers. “I’m proud to say that since I was a young actor, even when I had to pay the rent, I’ve never done anything that I was like, ‘Oh, man, this is embarrassing but I have to do this in order to get there,’ or ‘I have to pay the bills.’”
Not every actor can say that about their career, I suggest.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done s— things but the intention was right,” he backtracks modestly. “You just never know how it’s going to turn out. I only did things in my life for the sole purpose of thinking: This is going to be great. I’ve never done anything for money or as a step to get to something else, or because ‘Oh, this film is going to be seen by so many people.’ I’ve never cared about that.”
That mentality applies even to the most peculiar entries in his body of work, like “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” in which he voiced the villainous Wolf. Even that furry animated adventure served a purpose for him to grow as an actor.
“For a while I was a little self-conscious, not about my accent but about how I speak, like, ‘Am I flowing with these words in English correctly? Do they feel real?’” Moura explains. “Then at some point I was like, ‘Just be yourself.’ Playing Wolf in ‘Puss in Boots’ was great for that.”
Moura’s Wolf has some famous fans. “The other day I saw Ryan Coogler and he was like, ‘You know how I created the eyes of the vampires in “Sinners?” By watching the Wolf in “Puss in Boots”’ — and I was like, ‘What?’” he sputters with a boisterous laugh. Moura’s kids love the movie too.
As someone with increasingly strong ties to the United States, the actor is hyperaware of the parallels between what has happened in Brazil under Bolsonaro and the current political climate in his adoptive country.
“It’s very clear that there is an escalation of authoritarianism in the U.S.,” Moura says. “But it’s in moments like this that an awareness — of how important democracy is — comes. Americans usually take democracy for granted. Here, people think that democracy is a given. And when a government with these kind of tendencies shows up, it’s a wake-up call for people to go, ‘No, democracy is something that we have to fight for every day.’”
Raised in what he describes as a humble environment by a stay-at-home mother and a father who was an air force sergeant, Moura believes his fierce sense of justice stems from the poverty he witnessed as a young person. Today he works as an ambassador against slave labor for the International Labor Organization.
And though he started acting at age 15, joining a theater group for teenagers, he studied journalism in college and worked at a newspaper for a short time.
“Most of my friends are journalists and I was happy to play a journalist in ‘Civil War’ and in a series called ‘Shining Girls,’ because I think that journalism is a very important thing — nowadays, especially,” he says.
Acting was ultimately his calling, though he admits at first it was more about his interest in hanging out with theater people. At home, Moura is best known for two productions. First, there’s the popular 2007 soap opera “Paraíso Tropical,” in which he played an unprincipled businessman. “I did two soap operas and it was great,” Moura says excitedly. “I was feeling like, ‘I’m a Brazilian natural, motherf—.’ This is part of our culture!”
And then there’s the ferocious Captain Roberto Nascimento in the visceral 2007 crime thriller “Elite Squad” and its sequel “Elite Squad: The Enemy Within” from director José Padilha, who describes Moura as “a political animal.”
“In the cutting room, I watched the footage and it was apparent that Wagner had stolen the show,” Padilha recalls during a phone call from his home in L.A. “I had to reconstruct the voice-over to move the point of view from one character to another.”
That’s because Moura’s Captain Nascimento was not originally the film’s protagonist, but Moura’s performance demanded more attention. Padilha first saw the actor in Carlos Diegues’ comedy “God Is Brazilian.” And though the tone between that film and “Elite Squad” couldn’t be more different, he thought Moura could do anything.
Moura and Padilha reunited once they both were working stateside. When Padilha met with Netflix’s Ted Sarandos to discuss “Narcos,” the executive asked who he’d cast as Pablo Escobar, to which the director immediately replied, “Wagner Moura,” and assured Sarandos that Moura spoke fluent Spanish. He didn’t.
“It wasn’t like I thought about it deeply,” Padilha says with a chuckle as he reminisces. “It’s almost like if they asked me, ‘Who do you want to be the No. 10 in your soccer team?’ I would say, ‘I want Pelé to be No. 10.’ I don’t even have to think about it.”
On his own dime, Moura traveled to Medellín, Colombia, to study Spanish at the same university Escobar had attended. For the actor, Padilha says, choosing what he wants to do is always instinctual, never premeditated.
“Wagner doesn’t sell out,” says Padilha, emphatically. “There’s no money that can buy Wagner’s artistic focus.”
Moura speaks fast, at least in English, as if rushing to get his message across, but also as if questioning his own answers. When I share with him that I’m originally from Mexico, he briefly switches to Spanish. He finds it ironic that two Latin Americans are doing an interview in a tongue that’s neither our first.
“Cabrón,” he calls me, “you are Mexican and we’ve been here speaking in English all this time,” he says in Spanish with a hint of playful exasperation.
These days, he says he’s trying to allow himself to be himself while acting. That’s what he hopes to investigate further.
“Characters are more and more a reflection of myself, of what I would do if I was in this situation,” Moura explains. “And the fact that Kleber wrote ‘The Secret Agent’ for me means there’s a lot of me already in there — and a lot of him in there too.”
“Kleber is more stoic in a way,” he adds. “Right from the beginning I was like, ‘This is more Kleber’s temperature, this character that needs to be hidden, that needs to protect his kid, that can’t call attention to himself. Everything has to happen within him.’”
As someone straddling languages and latitudes, Moura believes that international actors with career aspirations in the U.S. often try to assimilate, diluting themselves in the process.
“When I first started coming here many times, someone was like, ‘Do you think you could play this with a standard American accent?’ And I was always like, ‘No, this is the way I speak.’” Moura recalls. “The more I bring Brazil with me, the more interesting I am as an artist, instead of trying to blend in and be what I’m not.”
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