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Fernanda Torres was prepared for what happened when she won the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama for her work in I’m Still Here. Well, she was sort of prepared.
When her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, received an Oscar nomination in 1998 for Central Station (the first Brazilian woman ever in the lead actress category), Torres watched closely. Experiencing the awards machinery for the first time, Montenegro “had to learn when she was doing it, and that was a bit stressful for her,” Torres recalls. “ I remember one day she called me and she said, ‘I’m in Denver. Where is Denver in the world?’”
So when Torres, 59, was signing the contract for I’m Still Here, directed by Central Station’s Walter Salles, she had a plan. ”I knew that this could happen, because Walter is a well-known director. If we did everything right, perhaps this kind of thing could happen.”
But when the star actually heard her name called out onstage, sitting next to her countryman Salles in the Beverly Hilton, all the preparation in the world wasn’t that helpful. “Inside I felt immediately like I was in a parallel universe,” Torres says of her speech. “ I’m happy now that I didn’t collapse.”
Speaking to Torres earlier this week for today’s special edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast, we both found ourselves in a bit of a parallel universe — as we spoke, Torres could see the smoke from the Los Angeles wildfires outside her hotel room window. In a moment of deep global uncertainty, though, her film I’m Still Here may hold even more power.
Torres plays Eunice Paiva, a Brazilian woman and mother of five who became a civil rights lawyer following her husband’s kidnapping by the authoritarian government. Salles, who knew the Paivas growing up in Rio de Janeiro, takes time to introduce us to the family before the kidnapping changes their lives; Eunice is not just inspiring, but a model of how to live even in a world turned upside down.
“It’s a dystopic time — we are really living in it,” Torres tells me in our podcast conversation. “And I think Eunice Paiva, she lived in a dystopic time. She is the kind of character who tells you how to say goodbye to your utopias and live in reality and find a way to reinvent yourself.”
Hear my conversation with Torres on today’s podcast episode, and for even more on I’m Still Here, read my conversation with Torres, Salles and Selton Mello, who plays Eunice’s husband, Rubens Paiva. Sony Pictures Classics will release I’m Still Here in U.S. theaters on Jan. 16. In addition to Torres’ Golden Globe win, it’s been shortlisted for the best international feature Oscar.
