When Wagner Moura last attended the Cannes Film Festival exactly 20 years ago, he met Kleber Mendonça Filho, then a critic and journalist. Mendonça Filho was interviewing Moura about the film Lower City, which was set in Moura’s hometown of Salvador; the two hit it off over their shared Northeast Brazil background, with Mendonça Filho hailing from the city of Recife. They stayed in touch. Mendonça Filho went on to emerge as a powerhouse director, most recently winning the Cannes Jury Prize for Bacurau, while Moura landed on Hollywood’s radar, portraying Pablo Escobar in Narcos and starring opposite Kirsten Dunst in last year’s box-office hit Civil War. But Moura attributes the strength and endurance of their bond to their strong political beliefs as much as their artistic sensibilities.
“We are both left-wingers and very vocal, and Brazil under [Jair] Bolsonaro, it was not easy, man. It was tough,” says the actor. “We were part of a group of artists in Brazil, supporting each other and figuring out a way to resist. It was resistance that connected us a lot.” Mendonça Filho adds of the authoritarian regime that took hold in 2016, “Artists were suddenly attacked and seen as degenerates. That’s how the far right sees us, so we kind of gravitated toward each other even if we lived in very different geographies.”
The timing feels auspicious in all kinds of ways, then, for The Secret Agent, which Mendonça Filho wrote specifically for Moura. For one thing, it’s coming on the heels of Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning I’m Still Here, which provided a jolt to the Brazilian film industry. Like that film, The Secret Agent is set in the ‘70s, in the midst of the previous military dictatorship in Brazil. The story follows Moura’s Marcelo, an academic hiding out in Recife circa 1977. He finds himself unwittingly on the run while embarking on a personal project to retrieve buried records.
Mendonça Filho infuses this “memory piece,” as he calls it, with vivid landscapes and naturalistic performances—chiefly from Moura, who’s at his most complex and moving in the role. Paced as a character-driven thriller, the film draws from the director’s childhood memories and the era’s long-open wounds. It’s also a showcase of Mendonça Filho’s distinctive sensibility, from its surrealist bent to its subtle evocation of the ‘70s conspiracy thriller. “The tricky thing is to make a very Brazilian film with some of these unusual tools for a Brazilian film,” the director says.
The Secret Agent will not only bring Moura back to Cannes, but marks his long-awaited return to the cinema of his birthplace: This is his first starring role in a Brazilian feature film in more than a decade. There are a lot of reasons for that: The censorship of the Bolsonaro era, Moura’s own career growth, the offers that had been coming his way. But as Moura tells it in his first interview about the project, it feels damn good to be home.
Vanity Fair: Kleber wrote this with you in mind. How do you think your prior relationship led to this collaboration?
Wagner Moura: Bolsonaro did the things that all the autocrats do. He attacked universities, journalists, and the cultural sector. I directed a film in 2018, Marighella, and it was censored in Brazil. It was crazy. I could only release the film there in 2021. Kleber suffered a lot too. He has this capacity of being a man who’s seen so many movies and can regurgitate all that he’s seen into something very Brazilian. I’ve been trying to work with him for a long time. The idea of him even writing something with me in mind was just amazing.
Am I right that this is the first Brazilian film that you’ve starred in for about a decade?
Yeah, it’s insane. I’ve been doing things outside: I did Narcos, which was a series— it took a long, long time—and I directed a film that took three years. And also, I wasn’t excited about anything that was going on in Brazil under Bolsonaro. Nothing was going on. There are other filmmakers that I’m excited about, but not many, to be honest with you. I was starting to be concerned about this generational gap: Do I know the young Brazilian filmmakers doing things? Are they interested in working with me? I went through all of this.
With Secret Agent, it was the fact that it was in Recife and was with Kleber and being such a Brazilian film—it meant a lot to me just to act and to say things in Portuguese again, to be connecting to that culture. I can’t even describe how important that was to me. Javier Bardem said something once that I really love: He works in English as if there’s a big office in his brain, filled with things going on, and when he works in Spanish, the office is empty. It’s a great metaphor. I didn’t speak English when I was a kid. I had to learn that. Even when I work in Spanish, it’s different, you know? Portuguese is my mother tongue. It’s the culture too. This film specifically was everything at once. I was so happy.
This film is set right around when you were born. Were you drawing on memories, family history, things like that?
I totally remember my parents and the way my father used to wear the same kind of shirt [as Marcelo], and how he used to put his pack of cigarettes in his pocket. A lot of [the film] connects you to something where even if you didn’t live it, you feel it. My mind worked in that sense: I thought about the photos of my father. I have this video of my parents’ wedding, and it’s in that part of the country.
The film that I directed also took place back in the ’70s during the dictatorship, but my film is about the struggle. Kleber’s film is interesting because it’s very political—it is about people that resisted the dictatorship—but it’s more like another circle when you throw a rock in the river and there’s those ripples. It’s like what we can feel now in the US—these governments and how they empower people in their words. I think this film is a lot about values and the kinds of values that come with a mindset like that.
There’s a beautiful scene where your character and other “refugees,” as they call themselves, essentially reveal they’re all using fake names with each other. They don’t say more than that, but it tells you everything you need to know about the fact that these are people who have resisted in one way or another.
I love the Ibsen play called An Enemy of the People, and I always think about that play when I think about The Secret Agent: Someone is punished for doing the right thing. It feels a little naive but it’s what happens when values are upside down. I’m reading this very interesting book called The Invisible Doctrine, about the secret history of neoliberalism. One part is about when citizens stop being called citizens and start being called consumers. There’s a big shift in the idea of citizenship and that kind of mindset. This film is a lot about how the values of a government can shape the minds of people in general—but the ones that are not in conformity with that idea really pay a price. I think here, Kleber is talking about himself and that specific time when we all lived in Brazil under Bolsonaro. We all paid a big price by not obeying or not agreeing with what was going on.
This is a film in many ways about memory and people who are forgotten. It’s universal, but I imagine there’s something politically charged there too. Can you give me some of that context?
The history of Brazil, like any history I think, is told by the point of view of the so-called winners. When I was a boy, the history was still very colonialist: “Oh, the Portuguese came to Brazil and they brought the Africans and they…” Even when we were talking about the military coup d’état, it “saved Brazil from communism”—I remember literally studying that kind of shit when I was a kid. With art in general, we have the capacity to recreate the narratives. I want to see more films in Brazil made by Indigenous communities, for example. But when a collaborator is very interested in the archives, as Kleber is, like [his documentary] Pictures of Ghosts—he likes to open boxes and physically manipulate things like tapes. It’s a way of talking about the potential threat of autocratic governments nowadays by talking about a time in our country from ’64 to ’85 where things went bad. People forget.
It’s crazy how Walter Salles’s film, I’m Still Here, became a thing among young people in Brazil. They didn’t even know that we had a dictatorship! It has a pedagogical aspect of it that I think is interesting, although the artistry is what makes us connect with it.
Kleber’s films are always an event, but do you feel this kind of renewed enthusiasm around Brazilian cinema right now, coming off of I’m Still Here?
I loved I’m Still Here and the connection it drew after Bolsonaro. The right-wing narrative in Brazil was, as always, anti-cinema, anti government spending money on culture and incentives for art—you know the thing. It’s exactly what’s going on in the US right now. I’m Still Here reconnected the Brazilian audience with our cinema, as a film for adults and a film about a very specific time in our history, which a scar that’s not yet healed.
We have in Brazil a horrible thing called the Law of Amnesty where torturers and killers and everybody just got free from what they did. When Walter Salles makes a film about that and it’s seen by the amount of people that saw it and with the amount of young people that went to the movies and the amount of people that were rooting for Fernanda Torres at the Oscars and looking at her and saying, “That artist represents us. There is a Brazilian artist that represents us in Brazil”—that is great. It says a lot about our country that is in this horrible polarized moment. It was an artist representing the country. The narrative that film brings matters to us, and beyond that, people are going, “Oh my god, so this really happened? Holy shit, that’s fucked up.”
Kleber’s film has a different approach to that time—like I said, the stone in the river thing—and I think it will have a political effect but also an artistic effect. It’s as Brazilian as you can get. It’s a beautiful film directed by someone that knows a lot about films and has seen many movies. He is an artist with a lot of sensibility.
You’ve played some bad guys, and Marcelo is fundamentally good. Was there anything about him that excited you or scared you?
I feel that my temperature as an actor is usually very hot. [Laughs] Kleber’s temperature is low. He’s a low pulse artist. He’s cooler. When he wrote this character thinking of me, he thought of something that he hadn’t seen me do yet. We never had this conversation, by the way—this is me just thinking. But the character also is a lot of who Kleber is. He takes his time. The emotions are very subtle and in the right place. The last scene of the film was my last day of shooting, and he hugged me and I felt he was crying—he was shaking. The challenge for me was to understand what Kleber wanted to do with him, to understand what he thought when he cast me—that this was also a reflection of who he is.
The performances are so naturalistic even as the filmmaking goes in specific, surreal directions. As a filmmaker yourself, acting for Kleber, what do you make of that?
He has a very accurate understanding of what he wants, the kind of acting he wants. I don’t think he’s a director that eats on set with the actors. I actually am not a fan of that kind of director. [Laughs] Kleber makes you dive into the universe that he’s creating, makes you understand what he’s doing, what he wants, and then you’re just doing it. How about that older actress in the beginning of the film? The lady that takes care of the refugees?
Tânia Maria. I looked her up after I saw the credits, she’s incredible.
She’s not even an actress! She had a line in Bacurau and Kleber was like, “She’s interesting.” Just looking at her, in many moments I was like, “This is the best acting.” Funny and crazy and smoking that cigarette and speaking with that voice. I was like, “This is absolutely amazing.” There are scenes in the film where I’m basically reacting to her as me, smiling. So absurdly great. I don’t know how he finds that. We all get immersed in his universe.
This story is part of Awards Insider’s in-depth Cannes coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the event’s biggest names. Stay tuned for more Cannes stories as well as a special full week of Little Gold Men podcast episodes, recorded live from the festival and publishing every day.
Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
How an Orgasmic Meditation Group Sparked a Troubled Federal Case
-
Deconstructing Trump’s Elaborate Oval Office Makeover
-
Molly Jong-Fast Reflects on Her Mother’s Dementia and the Fleeting Nature of Fame
-
Rita Hayworth’s Heartbreaking Vanishing Act
-
Meet Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, the First American Pope
-
Revisit All the Fashion, Outfits, and Looks From the 2025 Met Gala Red Carpet
-
The Dystopian Coming-of-Age Story Stephen King Considered Too “Merciless” to Film
-
Wes Anderson’s Next Breakout Star Just So Happens to Be Kate Winslet’s Daughter
-
All of Quentin Tarantino’s Movies Ranked
-
Elon Musk’s 14 Children and Their Mothers (That We Know Of)
-
From the Archive: Princess Margaret’s Not So Happily-Ever-After
The post Wagner Moura Makes a Deeply Personal Return to Brazilian Cinema in ‘The Secret Agent’ appeared first on Vanity Fair.
