NEW YORK — Wagner Moura can’t stop breaking records.
First Brazilian to be nominated as a lead actor at the Golden Globes. First South American to win best actor at the Cannes Film Festival. First Latino to win best actor in the New York Film Critics Circle’s 90-year history.
“Of course, I’m so proud of it,” says Moura — best known for playing Pablo Escobar on the Netflix hit “Narcos” — when I call to catch up after first meeting him for decaf coffee at a hotel near Central Park in late September. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I am the first Latino!’ But also I go like, ‘Really?’ … There were many great performances from that part of the world in these past 90 years.”
Still, Moura can’t help but marvel at the incredible run he’s been having as star of “The Secret Agent” — Brazil’s highest-grossing film this year, and arguably the most universally adoredmovie of 2025. The political thriller opens at a gas station outside Recife in 1977, “a time of great mischief,” during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Carnival is in full swing, and the authorities are too busy collecting bribes to pick up the dead body that’s been rotting in the dirt parking lot for days, the manager tells a traveler, Marcelo (Moura), who’s filling up his tank. When the police do roll through, it’s to shake down Marcelo, who’s savvy enough to get away with just handing over his pack of cigarettes.
Even in those opening moments of Kleber Mendoça Filho’s visionary film, Moura is able to convey the duality of a man walking a dangerous tightrope, amid a swirl of samba music and colorful characters. We learn that Marcelo is a scientist who ran afoul of the dictatorship and is now trying to flee the country with his young son.
Ultimately, Moura plays three characters — Marcelo, the man we meet under an assumed identity; Armando, the man he once was; and a third man in the future who can’t remember the brutality of the regime, but whose trajectory was forever altered by it. It’s a powerhouse performance in a movie that has grown increasingly relevant over the course of a year that has seen thousandsof Moura’s fellow Latinos ripped away from U.S. cities and into ICE detention.
And it has many wondering if this Brazilian superstar might have the Oscars juice to upset one of the most competitive Best Actor races in ages.
It also doesn’t hurt that the main promotional still of the movie, which features him leaning against a pole in an unbuttoned ’70s polo shirt, is so swoon-worthy that a friend grabbed my phone when she saw it and demanded to know who I was texting.
“Wagner is an interesting man, he’s an attractive man … but I did tell hair and makeup, ‘Just make him look good,’” Filho tells me, laughing.
Cary Grant in “North by Northwest” was an inspiration, as a dapper everyman who doesn’t understand, as Filho puts it, “what the f— is going on around him.” But, Filho continues, “We’re with him because he’s not playing dumb or naive. He’s just doing what any sensible, intelligent person would do finding himself in a completely bizarre situation, an unfair and unjust situation.”
Kirsten Dunst, Moura’s co-star in 2023’s “Civil War,” understands his ineffable magnetism. She didn’t hesitate to hop on the phone to talk about the weeks the cast spent snacking and trading stories while crammed into an SUV for Alex Garland’s apocalyptic journalism-road-trip thriller. Before the shoot, she says, she’d only seen clips of him playing Escobar (“I was like, ‘Damn, he’s powerful’”), but she walked away a big admirer. He had so much “goofy” energy and excitement about the movie, but she also saw him as “a very, very deep, kind person that really cares about how you’re doing, and is ready to talk about anything meaningful if you need to.”
Mostly, she recalls how much he loved talking about Brazil and all the music and food he wanted to introduce to them. “If I were Brazilian, he’d be my hero,” she says. “I feel like it’s a beautiful thing for his country, all the attention he’s getting, and I think he wears that with a lot of pride and responsibility, in a beautiful way. … I’m excited for Wagner. He deserves it.”
For Moura, these accolades take on a different weight. The 49-year-old was just a baby during the events of “The Secret Agent,” but the 21-year dictatorship, which ended in 1985, lasted for much of his early childhood and kept his parents’ and grandparents’ generations living in a constant state of fear.
“There were certain words that were off-limits,” says Moura, who remembers adults speaking at a whisper, even at home. “Everybody was afraid, because you could disappear.”
Then it happened again, with the 2018 rise of far-right military leader Jair Bolsonaro, who’s now in prison for a coup attempt that included a plot to kill the man who defeated him in the 2022 election.
To be honored for acting, Moura told me recently, is “beautiful, because the far right in Brazil was very effective under Bolsonaro [in] transforming artists into enemies of the people.”
Brazilian director Klebee Mendonça Fillho and star Wagner Moura during the standing ovation for THE SECRET AGENT, the longest and most enthusiastic of any I’ve seen so far — 15 minutes (with speeches) and tons of French ladies shouting “Bravo! from the balcony #cannes2025 pic.twitter.com/uePRou7I31
— Jada Yuan (@jadabird) May 18, 2025
In person, Moura is less hirsute and more gentle-seeming than in “O Agente Segreto” (the movie’s Brazilian name). The first thing you notice is his deep, mellifluously accented voice — half the comments on a video of him in the Criterion Closet are breathless odes to it. His character’s black hair and beard have been replaced with a tightly sheared salt-and-pepper haircut. He’s traded shirtlessness and ’70s trousers for an elegant and roomy lime-green suit picked out by his stylist. When Filho runs into him at the hotel and makes fun of how spiffy he looks, Moura gives a cheeky shrug, seemingly resigned to this weird new necessity as an Oscars contender.
The two men first met at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Both felt an immediate bond because they’re from Brazil’s northeast, known as poorer, more diverse and more left-leaning than the affluent cultural centers of Rio and São Paulo in the southeast. For years they kept in touch, as Moura developed a reputation for explosive performances in “Narcos,” “Civil War” and Apple TV’s “Dope Thief.”
But Filho felt that his friend had never been able to pay a classic hero, a good man being persecuted for sticking to his values in a corrupt society. So he began writing “The Secret Agent” with Moura in mind.
“I really felt I wanted to try something he hadn’t done before,” Filho tells me. “I was very confident that he would carry the film with his charisma.”
Moura has been politically outspoken his entire life. Search the internet and you’ll find his TV news debut at age 11, when he decried the purposeful flooding of his home city of Rodelas — “a tiny place in the countryside with, like, three streets” in the northeast state of Bahia — due to a dam that diverted the Rio São Francisco for a hydroelectric project.
Out of high school, he headed to journalism school in the predominantly Black city of Salvador, where he met the friends he still plays with in the post-punk band Sua Mãe(translation: Your Mom), as well as his partner, photographer Sandra Delgado. They got together during Carnival — she was covered in feathers, he was shirtless with a tutu around his neck and dyed flaming red hair — and are raising their three sons (José, 13; Salvador, 15; and Bem, 19) in Los Angeles, where they only speak Portuguese at home.
“I wanted to do something that would make a difference,” he says, but he quickly discovered he didn’t have the patience to sit around police stations sniffing for scoops.
He worked at a newspaper in the afternoon and acted in plays at night. A stint on a television program interviewing businessmen and celebrities followed. It didn’t stick. But the skills he acquired do serve him in “The Secret Agent,” where silent observation is key to survival, and also led to him getting cast as a war journalist in “Civil War.”
Moura assumed he’d spend his career as a stage actor, due to what he describes as a well-known “xenophobia” in Brazil’s movie and TV industries against actors from the northeast. “I would never think that I would work in television in Brazil because those characters were reserved for people that didn’t have my accent,” he says. The way he describes the divide between the north and the south, it sounds a little like if someone with a thick Cockney accent tried to play a barrister in a courtroom thriller for Masterpiece Theater.
But then came 2007’s “Elite Squad,” the brutal police thriller that made him a household name in Brazil. Its director, José Padilha, went on to cocreate “Narcos.” Moura wasn’t the obvious choice to play Colombian drug lord Escobar, but Padilha pushed for him from the start and convinced Moura he could handle not knowing how to speak Spanish. He gained 40 pounds and lived in Medellín for six months studying Spanish for the role, which earned him lavish praise and sparked countless Reddit discussions about his obviously non-native accent.
“Listen, I’m a Brazilian guy that learned Spanish to play one of most notorious personalities in the history of Colombia,” he tells me. “It’s like if they were like, ‘Let’s hire a Colombian to play Pelé. So, I totally get the criticism. I did the best I could.”
Over time, he’s accepted that the way he speaks is part of his selling point. It’s what got him a delicious part voicing the villainous wolf in 2022’s “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” a portrayal that Ryan Coogler recently told him inspired the vampires in “Sinners.”
He’s okay if he doesn’t get cast as a Texan or a native New Yorker; he’d question the sanity of the casting director. “Many times, people go like, ‘Could you do a standard American thing?’ And I go, ‘No,’ because my accent is also who I am — and who I am is who many other people who live in the country are,” he says. “Many people here speak with an accent. I want to represent them.”
He loved — “LOVED!” — for instance, when he first heard Diego Luna keep his accent while playing rebel leader Cassian Andor in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and the TV series “Andor.”
“I was like, ‘That’s it! A Mexican guy in Star Wars speaking with his accent!’” says Moura. “I think that’s so politically important.”
Every time Moura goes back to Brazil, he finds himself in a demonstration: four days before we met in New York, he told me, he was on a loudspeaker on a truck protesting Brazil’s conservative-led Congress’s attempt to pass an amnesty law that would shield its members from prosecution for coup-related offenses. (This week, lawmakers voted to drastically reduce Bolsonaro’s prison time.)
“The Secret Agent” is Moura’s first time acting in Portuguese in 12 years, partly because, he says, his outspoken criticism of the right wing made him a target of Bolsonaro’s wrath.
While filming his directorial debut, “Marighella,” a portrait of an Afro-Brazilian guerrilla leader from the ’60s who led an armed resistance against the military dictatorship, Moura had to keep his São Paulo shooting locations secret and hire heavy security because the production office kept receiving death threats. At restaurants or on the street, Moura would have strangers get into his face and call him a communist.
Though the movie premiered at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, it didn’t come out in Brazil until late 2021. A government agency that promotes national cinema in Brazil withheld money for its distribution, citing a problem with the film’s producer.
“They used the system and they just made it impossible for me to release my film, economically, sort of like what happened to Jimmy Kimmel,” says Moura. “It’s not that the president said, ‘Out!’ But he pressed the buttons that he had to press to make that happen.”
At the moment, though, Moura is delighted about the state of Brazilian democracy. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made it a day-one priority to restore state funding of the arts, alongside the Ministry of Culture, which Bolsonaro had disbanded.
The heartening atmosphere at home, though, stands in stark contrast to what’s happening in Los Angeles, where Moura says one of his friends — a Brazilian filmmaker married to an American man — was seized by ICE agents. (He asked she not be named for privacy reasons.)
“I’m not saying that we’re living in the U.S. in a dictatorship,” says Moura. “But I think that when you study history, you see those tendencies, like attacks on press, attacks on universities, attacks on free speech, attacks on artists. This is how it begins.”
That first day we met, just before the New York Film Festival premiere of “The Secret Agent,” Moura was reeling. No one knew where his friend was. Later, he told me that she’d gone into a federal immigration office to finalize her green card, been separated from her husband under the pretense of getting her passport photocopied, and suddenly found herself handcuffed, then transported to San Bernardino County, then Arizona, then Louisiana. Her lawyer couldn’t reach her, and her husband only managed to stop her deportation hours before she was to be flown out of the country. She’s now back home.
“It reminds me of horrible moments in [Brazilian] history where masked people were going in the streets doing that sort of thing,” says Moura, who became a U.S. citizen during the Biden administration.
“It’s a very sad side effect of the escalation of authoritarianism in the U.S.,” he says.
He worries that Americans take democracy for granted, he says, and just wants to do what he can “as a proud American” to impart wisdom from Brazil’s hard-earned lessons.
“Democracy is something you have to fight for,” he says. “It’s a daily fight, man.”
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