Wagner Moura says his character in The Secret Agent is ‘not a hero,’ but a man trying to do the right thing.Elevation Pictures
Brazilian actor Wagner Moura has made a solid Hollywood career out of creating the most dastardly of villains. From playing cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos to a slick assassin in Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith to being the every embodiment of Death in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Wagner has employed his rugged visage and slippery spirit to channel a slick kind of malevolence – his face seems to hide a thousand secrets, all of them bad.
Yet with director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s excellent new Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent, Moura gets to play the righteous hero – a whistleblower on the run from the corrupt dictatorship running the country in the late ’70s – and make a long-awaited return to Brazil’s film industry, where he first cemented his star power. While attending The Secret Agent’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere this past September, Moura sat down with The Globe and Mail to talk about his homecoming.
The film can sometimes be a wild mash of genres, and I love how Kleber incorporated so much of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, of all things, into the world you both build. How much did you two talk about the cinematic influences that went into this?
You know there’s a funny thing, because the Brazilian city Recife is one of the cities in the world in which there’s the biggest amount of shark attacks in the world. The other thing about Kleber is, you can see when watching his films, is that he’s fascinated by American films from the ’70s, anamorphic lenses, zooms, things like that. And when I read the script, I immediately thought about this Ibsen play, An Enemy of the People, which is about a doctor who discovers the water of the hot springs, this tourist attraction, is contaminated with some serious bacteria. And he runs and tells the authorities – we have to shut this down. And the mayor of the city declares this guy the enemy of the people. And that’s exactly the plot of Jaws, and I made this connection because the character I play in the film is a man just trying to do the right thing in a very hostile environment. He’s not a hero, just trying to do the right thing, and suffering the consequences.
It’s interesting, this man trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation, there are echoes of your character in last year’s drama Civil War, but it’s also the polar opposite of Escobar in Narcos. How deliberate have you been in seeking out protagonists lately?
I think everybody is everything, really. This character is trying to do the right thing, but it doesn’t mean that he’s a great guy. We’re all very mixed, and what I try to do is think about the character as not good or bad, just people. I put myself in a lot of it – how would I react in this situation? I don’t want to sound narcissistic, but it’s so often a reflection of me and what I would do that gives the performance some truths. We contain everything. There’s one point in the film where my character says he could kill this guy with a hammer, and I think that we could all think that sometime.
Is that ambiguity something you discussed deeply with Kleber?
Yes, but we were always on the same page. We wanted the character to be perceived as sticking to your values. We never wanted him to be Mr. Do-Gooder. I played the character that was really hard, it was a film called Sergio. Based on a real UN guy, who was so nice, so great, so elevated, so infallible. And with Escobar it’s the opposite. But we, as actors, contain everything.
This is the first film you’ve made back in Brazil in some time.
It was great. I hadn’t acted in Portuguese in 12 years. I did Narcos, then I directed this film called Marighella, about a Brazilian politician, and that took me a long time to make. I had to fight to get the film out ...
That film was censored by the Brazilian government, yes?
I had to fight the Bolsonaro government to have it released. During Bolsonaro, no one was doing anything in Brazil because the first thing they attack is the press, the universities, the artists. It was heartbreaking, because I’m very connected to Brazil in terms of politics and culture. So to be able to make this film with Kleber in a place I’m so connected to, it was wonderful, and very liberating.
With this film now out and the success of Walter Salles’s film I’m Still Here last year, do you think there might be higher interest in your film Marighella outside of Brazil now?
I think so. There might be more interest in Brazilian films, and Brazilian films about the dictatorship. There are people who say you should stop making films about that time. But this film, Walter’s film, these are all movies about memory. And there are people in Brazil, young people, who ask, oh, was there a dictatorship here? I had no idea. The way history is taught in Brazil, it’s not quite there. Even the history of colonization in Brazil.
Well, history is written by the victors.
And that’s always bothered me, and one of the things that made me want to direct Marighella. But Brazil has another thing that is different from other dictatorships in South America, because in Brazil we have this thing called amnesty law, so the slates were wiped clean of any torturers. Had we not had that law, a guy like Bolsonaro would never have been elected.
The Secret Agent is now playing in select theatres.
This interview has been condensed and edited.