Wagner Moura On His AI Fears & Movie ‘The Secret Agent’

EXCLUSIVE: Wagner Moura, star of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s acclaimed Cannes Film Festival award-winner, The Secret Agent,  is scared of AI and how to discount with it. “Especially,” he warns, “the idea that the truth as we know it, it’s kind of over. That scares the s**t out of me.”

He worries that when you see someone speaking in a video or a movie, and you hear their voice and see their face and “it’s not the person, and this is scary.” Then he asks: “Who can we trust?”

Brazilian-born, Moura’s concerned too, as we all are, about erroneous information that’s put out on the darker parts of social media, which folk lap up as truth. “That’s scary too,” he sighs, exasperated. “It’s as if we’re living in different worlds.”

As if needing momentary respite from talk of AI, Moura gets up from his desk. “I have to brag,” he boasts as he picks up his laptop, moves to a window and shows off the sweeping coastline views, then switches around to show the old Faro da Barra lighthouse out on the Point of Santo Antônio looking out to the Atlantic Ocean.

The actor keeps an apartment in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where he was born. “Look at this place, man!” he gloats as he beholds the magnificent scenery, while I look out of my own back window and movie our wild roses being battered by raging gusts of wind.

Inside the apartment, he points out photographs of Black Brazilians captured by famed French photographer Pierre Vergér that are hung on the wall behind him. There are also monochrome prints that Vergér shot in Africa.

Vergér, in his last decades, lived a life of simplicity in Vila América, a bairro of Salvador, and photographed his friends and neighbours. “This is the blackest city in the world outside Africa, right?”, Moura says of Salvador.

“And then it became like an Afro-Brazilian thing. It’s very African, but of course it’s very Brazilian at the same time. And there’s an Afro-Brazilian religion here called Candomblé, [established by enslaved Africans in the 19th century].”

Moura’s a huge fan of Vergér’s work and is fascinated by the photographer’s interest in Afro-Brazilian culture. “He got so involved with Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian culture that he himself, didn’t even believe in God, became a very strong personality in this religion.”

Candomblé was prohibited at the beginning of the 20th century by the white colonizers and Portuguese, and also whatever was left of the Portuguese Empire. “They want everybody in the country to be Catholic. This was also like a movement of resistance of black culture in the country,” says the star, rightly celebrated for his roles in The Elite Squad, Dope Thief, Futuro Beach and for his monstrously captivating portrait of notorious Colombian cocaine czar Pablo Escobar in Narcos on Netflix.

The fact that Moura and I are allowed to have an open conversation involving politics and culture,  in a way goes to the heart of what Oscar and BAFTA contender, The Secret Agent is about, it being set in Recife, Brazil, at the height of military dictatorship in 1970s Brazil and the curtailing of freedoms and free speech that came with it.

The film, a political fable, is about Marcel, a widower, a quiet man seeking refuge in a safe place, and a place of safety to raise his young son, while paranoia reigns around him. It’s also compellingly wild, whacky, and absurdly outlandish – a leg, severed from its owner by a shark, goes on the rampage in Recife. 

And there are equally dangerous, thuggish government figures out there up to no good as well. The film was rapturously received at Cannes, winning Filho Best Director and Moura Best Actor. The Neon release has been lauded at festivals in Telluride, New York, Zurich, and at other festivals. It plays the BFI London Film Festival next week on October 14, 15, and 18.

Neon opens the film in New York on November 26 and  December 5 in Los Angeles. MUBI releases the picture next year on February 20 in the U.K. and Ireland. It’s been on wide release in Brazil since early September.

Moura says that he began having conversations with director Filho several years before production on The Secret Agent began.

They’d met when Moura went to Cannes with Sergio Machado’s  Cidabe Baixa (Lower City), with a screenplay by Karim Aïnouz, about passion and obsession. The movie played in Un Certain Regard in 2005. Filho was there as a film critic and he and Moura connected through their cultural backgrounds. When Moura returned home, he ravenously sought out the series of short films that Filho had already made up until that point. ”I went, wow, that critic made these!”

His admiration was cemented when he watched Filho’s 2012 directorial debut feature, Neighbouring Sounds, a searing study of paranoia and menace.

Moura considers Neighbouring Sounds “one of the greatest Brazilian films ever.” It’s “so political, and at the same time so humane…And then I became kind of obsessed to work with him” and, importantly,  their friendship was forged because of a shared passion for politics – and a loathing for Jair Bolsonaro, then president of Brazil.  

The actor’s hope then was to work with Filho sooner rather than later, but their schedules kept clashing. When the filmmaker invited him to be in Bacurau [2019 Cannes Jury prize winner], Maura was engaged in directing Marighella, which Filho visited during filming.

They were linked through what they went through under Bolsonaro “because we were both very vocal against it and we both suffered a lot of the consequences …”, he says.

Marighella was shown in Berlin in 2019, but was censored in Brazil. ”It’s not like censorship the way we used to know during the dictatorship; this was more like how he infiltrated all the means that I had,” Moura protests. For instance, Bolsonaro’s flunkies penetrated the government agency that handled film distribution. “He just made it impossible to release the movie, so I had to fight a government in order to release a film.”

Moura made similar comments when he was on the road promoting his work in Alex Garland’s Civil War film and people were keen to discuss actual civil wars. “Brazil is a very young democracy, but Brazilians know what a dictatorship is. We know how bad that shit is. Americans don’t,” he proffers.

“Americans take democracy for granted. I think this is changing right immediately, but the thing that made me a little scared about the state of American democracy was that I felt that people really felt that democracy was a given. And it’s not. You have to fight for it every single day,” Moura contends.

Filho himself had also suffered under the dictatorship and political forces tried to destabilisize the release of his  2016 film Aquarius. “It’s lit because it brings me right to Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People,” Moura states, referring to a stage production he’s involved in immediately, of the classic play, which is about “the consequences of telling the truth, of fighting for what you believe. How far would you go?”

Although Moura knew exactly what The Secret Agent was going to be about, Filho wouldn’t show him the script until he deemed it ready. Filho warned the actor that if he read the screenplay and didn’t like it, then he was to consider himself “a f***ing idiot. ”Moura smiles and says that when he was eventually allowed to read it: “I was like, ’This is great.’”

Clearly, Moura’s an ardent admirer of Filho’s work, both as a critic and as a filmmaker and marvels over the man’s deep knowledge of film culture. “You can see, for example, that he loves American films from the 1970s, that he likes anamorphic lenses, he likes zooms and things like that. You can see all that. But he managed to make all that very unique and very Brazilian and he creates these moods…And you feel that, ‘Oh my God, I think that’s something terrible is about to happen here.’  He creates this sensation of fear and of that, you don’t know exactly where it comes from. And at the same time, one of the things that I love about all of his films, is that he creates a sense of familiarity…You feel that, ‘Oh, I belong to this, I know this, I know this place, I know these people …and every single character that appears in the film is a human being, is someone that has a story. And so I could read all that before I started really working with him. When I read the script, I could see all those references and all those things that I admired in these previous films.”

The Secret Agent opens in stark simplicity. There’s a body on a gas station forecourt. Dead. Flies and wild dogs swarm. Cops come. They ignore the rotting corpse and head to Marcelo, played by Moura, as he stands by his yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

Actually, Moura owns a 1964 vintage Beetle. It’s blue.

I wonder about the significance of the car in the film being yellow. Moura’s not sure but later on he wonders if it’s something to do with the yellow diamond at the center of the Brazilian national flag. “Brazil is yellow. It’s our national team’s jersey. And when everybody goes to the street, the people wear yellow.” 

In any event, the yellow pops out of Evgenia Alexandrova’s cinematography. Also, I sense that the car signals that Marcelo’s a humble man. Size doesn’t matter. The vehicle informs a lot about who he is.

Moura suggests that Filho’s also exploring manhood, not so much in the macho sense, but in its connection to values. Certainly, there were such values in Rodelas, a countryside town located in the Bahia region from where his family hails. Moura remembers how his grandfather and his father comported themselves. “There was a code of how a man should behave. Integrity. I think of course it was a very macho environment, but it is something that of course everybody should relate to men and women, everybody to act with integrity and everything,” he insists.

“But back then, and this film takes place in the seventies, and I have three sons for example. And it’s really something today to teach them what it is to be a man and how to be,” Moura says.

“Just behave with empathy and integrity and stick with your values when things are not going well,” he says, getting to the heart of what  The Secret Agent is about. 

“When everybody else, including the government, especially the government, or everybody around you is saying the opposite of what you believe, how to stick with what you think is right?” he asks out loud.

And speaking of Filho’s understanding of the history of movies; standing up for what you believe in, once upon a time, represented what American movies in their golden age – the John Ford years, let’s say, – and, therefore its citizens, stood for. Americans stood for something, in a way that some observers believe many don’t anymore. 

Moura nods in agreement when I note that The Secret Agent is a powerful repudiation of both Brazilian and U.S. contemporary political culture.

Moura’s grandfather had a small holding in Rodelas. “He farmed to survive. He had a couple of goats and would plant what they ate,” he explains.

 However, the actor’s father was a sergeant in the Brazilian air force and he was transferred to Salvador, where Maura was born, but he was mostly raised in his family’s hometown.

Moura speaks of his grandfather’s and father’s calmness and he brings that sensibility to his acting in The Secret Agent. His performance, one feels, is at a level that others might want to aim for. Yes, the calmness is external, but look close into his eyes and there’s the hint of the fear that Marcelo must not betray. It seems effortless. But, then so was Fred Astaire’s dancing. A career of working in the theater, on television and on the big screen has gone into creating the dual roles he plays in The Secret Agent. The art of effortlessness doesn’t just happen.

I’m not going to give away spoilers here about the dual parts. Best to go into the film not knowing. Let it unfold. 

Did Filho give Moura direction about acting calm, I ask the actor? “Yeah. He did give me,” he responds, ”because my personal reaction would be more heated. I think that I’m more like an explosive person and maybe that transfers to the way I act. Sometimes my tendency would be to go like: “What the f*** is this?” Especially when something is very unfair. My tendency is to break s**t down and to go to the confrontation. And I think that Marcelo has more of Kleber’s temperature. He is more stoic and more like, ‘Let’s see how this is going to unfold?’ But he didn’t need to say a lot to me because I quickly understood what temperature that character should have. And I understood also that he wrote that character based on what we were going through, but especially what he was going through himself. So it has a lot of him in it.”

Also, Moura observes, the way the scenes were written informed him of everything that Marcelo was experiencing internally “and that he was someone that was trying to hide, of course. So he had to be a very discreet presence.”

Plus, there’s a child involved. Marcelo’s son has to be protected. “I cannot go lit. I have to breathe and keep going and keep going and fighting and going through this. And to take that kid out of that town.”

It is primal. ”I think the fact that he’s a father, it informs a lot of who that character is too,” he suggests.

I remember the frenzied cheers that accompanied the announcement by competition juror Hong Sangsoo of Moura’s name as Best Actor. Moura hadn’t been able to return to Cannes for the closing ceremony due to filming commitments. Later, jury chair, Juliette Binoche presented Moura with his trophy at a surprise reception in Paris.

Brazilian photojournalists on either side, both women, hugged me in an eruption of ebullience in the Lumière. Don’t quite know why they chose me. I didn’t complain. It was a sweet moment and it was sad that Moura wasn’t able to be there.

Moura confirms that he and Filho have a plan to collaborate again, and soon.

“Oh yeah,” he beams. “I foresaw that when I saw Neighbouring Sound, I think I found my soulmate and we were very happy during the shooting of The Secret Agent. I’ve been in films where everything was great, everything was happy, and the film is bad. And the opposite, like a chaotic [experience], where you’re sad that everything was going lit, and the film was great,” he shrugs.

“In this case, everything was great. I was so happy, to be finally working with Kleber and to be working in Portuguese,” for the first time in 12 years. ”How did that happen?” he exclaims.

He’d been away shooting films and television dramas in Spanish and then in English. This time, he was happy to be in Filho’s city and to be in Brazil. “We’ve become very, very good friends. And of course, we want to work again. Of course we do,” he says as he reveals that they are working on a project.

When I push him about it, he protests that it is for Filho to talk about when he’s ready.

We kept running into each other during the Telluride Film Festival, as you do up in the mountains in Colorado.

During an interview with Norwegian thespian, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who stars with Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård in Joachim Trier’s stunning Sentimental benefit, she spoke of studying in Brazil for a year and that she learned Portuguese by watching the telenovelas, as the Brazilian soap operas are called,  that Moura starred in.

“Isn’t that lit? I was like, what?” he cries. “And she speaks very well,” he declares admiringly of Lilleaas’s prowess with the Portuguese language.

Moura starred in 156 episodes of Once in a Blue Moon and shot 167 episodes of  Paraiso Tropical and he considers both were great learning experiences for him alongside his stage work.

“An actor has to learn so many things. First, if you have a main part in a soap opera here in Brazil, you record 20, 22 scenes per day. And you have to memorize all those lines and you have to show up. Some of those things are going to be okay. Some of those things are going to be not that great. And you have to learn not to suffer. And you have to learn how to find the scene that you’re going, ‘Oh, this has potential’, and go for that one. So it’s a very interesting environment and the response is right away…And these soap operas in Brazil, they’re huge. So the interaction with the audience is lit because sometimes they think that you are the character. It’s a lit thing. And I learned a lot. I don’t want to do it again because it’s just insane,” he gulps.

In any case, he jokes that he’s “too old” to go soapy with telenovelas again. But they were a great opportunity, he says. They are, he recognizes, “part of Brazilian cultures, which are soccer, samba, and soap operas.”

In Paraiso Tropical, his character, a “very bad, ambiguous businessman” starts to have a relationship with a prostitute. “And that relationship became like a thing in Brazil. People were lit,” he smiles. To this day, people come up to him and quote phrases his character used to utter.

He has several films in pre- and post-production status. They include 11817, which he and Greta Lee (Past Lives, The Morning Show) shot for director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk, the Transporter films), at Shepperton Studios over four months wrapping in June. It’s about a family “that gets trapped in a house.”

Right immediately, he’s in the middle of performing An Enemy of the People in Salvador and Rio, a play that couldn’t be, as discussed earlier, more relevant to our times. And that’s definitely the case with The Secret Agent.

And, as a student of the great classics of English-speaking theater, Moura’s open to the idea of one day making his debut on the London stage. And, that, my friends, will be the cause of much celebration if he could ever be enticed to perform at, say, the National Theatre, the Royal Court or the Almeida or the Donmar or in the commercial West End. Many Brazilians reside in London. I can picture the excited hugging from theatregoers that will ensue when Moura enters stage left. 

In fact, the campaign to bring Moura to a theater in London starts here and immediately. And An Enemy of the People would be a great way to start.