🎧 Wagner Moura Believes ‘Empathy’ Always Beats Tyranny
‘The Secret Agent’ star, a top best actor contender, tells me about knocking away stereotypes and waiting out Brazil’s Bolsonaro
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Wagner Moura firmly believes that northeastern Brazil, where his film The Secret Agent is set in the city of Recife, is the most beautiful part of the country.
“The greatest artists come from that part of the country,” he tells me on today’s special bonus episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “The people are very warm and friendly and beautiful.”
He is, he admits, a little biased — Moura, 49, was born in nearby Salvador, and bonded with The Secret Agent director Kleber Mendonça Filho over their shared home region, which Brazilian and international audiences were usually far less likely to see onscreen. When Moura was beginning his career in Brazilian telenovelas, he tells me, “An actor from Salvador couldn’t even dream of working on television in Brazil, because all the roles reserved for people who spoke with the kind of accent I had were stereotypes — you know, the funny guy or the bandit.”
That’s all changing now, Moura adds, as the political culture in Brazil changes dramatically as well. Since The Secret Agent premiered at Cannes in May and won two prizes — best director and best actor for Moura — he and Filho have been on a global tour with the period political thriller, speaking to audiences around the world who find endless modern-day resonance in it. (Neon picked up the North American distribution rights for the film at Cannes and released it in select theaters late last month.) Set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, The Secret Agent follows Armando (Moura), a former professor who finds himself caught up in the political turmoil of the final years of the regime. Moura and Filho have been vocal about the ways that the right-wing presidency of Jair Bolsonaro between 2019 and 2022 froze out opportunities for leftist filmmakers, themselves included; now that Bolsonaro is on his way to serving a prison sentence, and with The Secret Agent as well as last year’s Oscar-nominated sensation I’m Still Here bringing Brazilian cinema to global audiences, there’s a palpable sense of doors opening again.
Or, as Moura puts it to me, “Despite all of the tyrants, the totalitarianism and the amount of things that are happening, the world is going in a better direction in terms of empathy and diversity. There’s no way this is not gonna be the way.”
On today’s podcast, Moura and I talk about the whirlwind experience of The Secret Agent’s success, which included a best actor win for Moura this week from the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as two Critics Choice nominations. We also discussed what he learned not only from his Brazilian telenovela experiences but also from working in American television on shows like Narcos and Dope Thief — including how Brian Tyree Henry became “a brother” to Moura, who had just a weekend to jump into production on the latter show.
Hear it all on today’s special edition of the podcast. If you want much more on the busy week of awards we just went through, subscribe to Prestige Junkie After Party and hear me, Christopher Rosen and Joyce Eng break it all down in a special episode out now, only for paid subscribers.