Wagner Moura
Jeremy Strong
Mark Seliger for TIME
I had the honour of serving on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival last year. One night I sat in the back of the enormous Palais theater and watched in admiration and awe as Wagner Moura carried us through 1970s Recife, Brazil, and then carried us somewhere reserved for transcendent performances: into the heart of life. The jury awarded him the prize for Best Actor.
Long a legend in Brazil, he has been on the world’s stage for some time now. But, this past year, Moura punched a hole through the world’s ceiling.
Also at Cannes last year, Robert De Niro made a speech in which he said, “Fascists should fear art.” Moura, living under Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing government from 2019 to 2023, is someone who understands that democracy and freedom are things you have to fight for every day (an idea that our often somnolent country is quickly waking up to). Moura is not afraid to use the humanizing, galvanizing power of art as a weapon. From The Secret Agent to his feature directing debut Marighella (an indictment of the Brazilian military dictatorship) to his work onstage last year in an adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, (how far are you willing to go to fight for the truth?)—he is a force of the political and the humane, a duo we desperately need more of. When De Niro said fascists should fear art, he was talking about artists like Moura. The kind of artist we need more than ever right now.
Strong is an Emmy- and Tony-winning actor
Read TIME’s interview (abridged) with Wagner Moura below:
‘I Say Things. I’m Not Afraid.’ Wagner Moura Wants to Tell You the Truth
(Film critic)
If you like your movie stars to be seen—and admired—but not heard, Wagner Moura’s not your guy. Born in Brazil but now living in Los Angeles, Moura freely speaks his mind on political issues in both his home country and his adopted one. “Listen,” he says when we meet in mid-March, “I’m very vocal. I say things. I’m not afraid. I never was afraid to say what I believe, because that’s how I am.”
Though Moura’s latest film, The Secret Agent, is set in Brazil in 1977, at a time when that country was under the thumb of an oppressive political dictatorship, it has resonated with viewers all over the world—particularly in the United States. Moura plays a research scientist who’s become a government target, a man on the run whose greatest wish is to settle down and live a quiet life with his young son. Directed by Moura’s friend Kleber Mendonça Filho, The Secret Agent works as an artful, beguiling thriller, but it’s also a picture of a country whose citizens, in real life, had reason to live in fear. Moura, 49, was just a baby during this period, but as he got older, he saw how its effects lingered. He thinks one reason American viewers have responded to the film is because they sense the creeping threat of authoritarianism at home. We’re not living under a dictatorship yet, he says, but he points to ways the government has been trying to exert control over its citizens, including curtailing the work of scientists like his character. “All that is happening already,” he says. “It’s a huge red flag. It’s not hard to read. Whoever’s not reading that red flag is either an accomplice of what’s going on or is not really paying attention.”
At the Cannes Film Festival last May, Moura won the Best Actor award for his role in The Secret Agent. From there, both the movie and Moura were unstoppable: the film was up for four Academy Awards, including one for Moura’s subtly wrought performance. Moura, the first Brazilian to be nominated for the Best Actor award, didn’t win, nor did the film: it lost out in every one of its categories. But talking to Wagner in L.A. just three days after the ceremony is a bit like hearing an excited schoolkid relay his recent adventures. He still can’t believe how far the film has come—and how far he has come—since that Cannes premiere. Disappointment is the last thing the whole Secret Agent team is feeling. “For us, it was like, ‘If we get an Oscar, great. If we don’t, we’re here.’ It was such an unexpected thing.”
Moura has long been a movie star in Brazil, and has an unbreakable link to the country. At home, he, his wife, and three sons speak only Portuguese, and he keeps a place in Salvador, in the state of Bahia, where he grew up. Though he began his film and TV career more than 25 years ago, American audiences, until recently, would have known him mostly for the Spanish-language Netflix drama Narcos (he played Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar), or for Alex Garland’s 2024 dystopian thriller Civil War…
