In The Secret Agent, Wagner Moura Makes the Political Personal

0:01Hey, Little Gold Men listeners, especially the ones across the pond. We're recording a Little Gold Men episode live in London on the evening of February 19th with the cast of Sentimental Value. We've got a select number of tickets to give out to our listeners. So if you'd like to join the fun, email us at littlegoldmen at vf.com. We hope to see you there.

0:31Hello and welcome to Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. I'm Rebecca Ford. My guest today is Wagner Mora, who's nominated for an Oscar for his incredible leading performance in The Secret Agent. Even if you haven't yet seen the film, you might know him from his role in Civil War opposite Kirsten Dunst, or from his turn as Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series Narcos. The Secret Agent is set in Brazil in 1977, a time of great mischief, as the film calls it. Wagner plays Armando, a former professor now living undercover after he angered the wrong official. It's a surprisingly funny, beautifully shot, and wholly original film, and Wagner's performance is incredible.

1:18And I just want to let you know, we're treading lightly into spoiler territory in this interview because I could not ask him about the story's remarkable ending. Wagner and I caught up a couple weeks ago, shortly after he got the news of his nomination. Speaking from outside his house, Wagner told me about his collaboration with The Secret Agents director, Cleber Mundoza Filio, his own upcoming directorial project, and how his politics helped him explore the character. Oh, and he also explains what the hairy leg is. Let's dive in.

1:52Wagner, I'm so excited you could join us today. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Rebecca. I heard that you topped off your very exciting Oscar nomination by being called into jury duty. And that's how you spent the last few days. Yeah, so that's very new for me. So far, I haven't been summoned. I heard that if they don't call me until Monday or something, then I'll be good to go. So there's no Oscar nominee free ticket out of jury duty, I guess. You're going to be too busy in the next couple of months to be on a jury, I would say. I guess so. Well, you know, it's been a journey for this film, as you're saying, you know, all the way from Cannes to now this.

2:33You've been a busy part of the sort of awards season. And have there been any specific artists or filmmakers that you've had a really wonderful interaction with or anything surprising throughout these last few months? Yeah, I mean, I get a little like, sometimes I get very shy with these things. But I had the chance to have dinner with Al Pacino. Okay. That was a highlight in my life, I think. It was wonderful, and he's wonderful, and it was really something for me. It meant a lot, how warm he was, and I was in front of such a legendary man. I don't even know what to say. But in this award season, you end up bumping into the same people, which is very cool because you kind of start to create a relationship with some of them, with people from Sentimental Value or even Benicio del Toro, who I knew beforehand, but I'm such a fan, so nice to see him and to go again.

3:44So it's very exciting to be around people that you admire so much. Yeah, it's nice when you meet someone like Al Pacino and you meet your heroes and they don't disappoint you. I think that's the best, right? That's the best. And they know this far from, far from disappointing. It was just like, he was so wonderful. Well, if Al Pacino is known for anything, I think it's movies in the 70s. And obviously, The Secret Agent is set there as well. I wanted to jump specifically into the movie, which I loved so much. And I was really struck by how it focuses on normal people, you know, rather than those in power.

4:23Your character is a professor. And I'm curious if that was something that drew you to the story or what really made you say, yes, I want to take on this character. Yes, Rebecca, but this is a very different project for me because Kleber and I developed it together and it came from a very personal thing that we both shared, which was what it was to live in Brazil under a fascist government and being vocal against it and suffering the consequences of it. all that. So I knew that that character had a lot to do with myself and with Cleber and with, you know, exactly what you said, like a regular people that are not like freedom fighters from the 70s.

5:14We're not like revolutionaries or anything. We're like just people that, and that's the majority of the citizens that suffer with authoritarian governments or people that are not specifically trying to fight the governments. They have their lives affected just because they are who they are, just because the gay community in some places or just because of the religion that one has or the color of someone's skin. I like that a lot about this film, about the fact that this is a professor, a scientist, an academic, which is one of the things that authoritarian governments attack first is universities, right?

5:59Like journalists and artists. So, yeah, it made a lot of sense to me. So tell me about that sort of personal ties. How much of it was about your own family history and bringing that into the story? Not a lot about my family history. I think because my parents were very, you know, they were not involved in politics. I think it's more about the logic of Brazil that's not exclusively the logic of the dictatorship. It's something that persists. It's still there. I directed a film in 2017 that premiered in 2019 about a revolutionary, a guy who was fighting against the dictatorship. And so I had studied a lot about what Brazil was back in the 70s and the 60s and during it.

6:52But I feel that it's, that The Secretariat is not a film about the dictatorship. And it takes place in the 70s. But it's, like I said in the beginning, it's pretty much about what it was to live in Brazil under Bolsonaro. And the logic that even under Lula, which is like, for me, it's one of the greatest leaders that Brazil had ever had. But even under Lula, it's a logic that still persists in the country. Like, we're talking about the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery. You know, Bolsonaro is not a character that emerged from nothing. You know, he's deeply grounded in the history of that country, which is a history of, like, lots of beautiful things.

7:38I loved that the cast of this film was recognized by the Academy Awards because that cast is not only made of amazing, talented actors, but also the diversity of the cast says a lot of what Brazil is. It's a very diverse country. Do you know that the Brazilian passport is the most wanted passport in the black market? Because everybody can look like a Brazilian. So I love that about Britain. It's a very progressive, you know, in some very different ways. We have a very progressive constitution. It's a very diverse country. It's full of beauty, but it's also deeply grounded in violence, authoritarianism, and lots of coup d 'etats, and elitism, and social inequity, injustices.

8:28So I think the secret agent is about the logic of that country, not specifically the logic of the dictatorship. Mm-hmm. Interesting. We're going to go a little bit spoilery here because the movie has been out. I'm saying this, I'm going to say this in the beginning of the episode. I'm saying it again now in case there are people listening who haven't seen it yet. Because what are you thinking that you haven't seen it yet? But, you know, towards the end of the movie, you get to play essentially another character at the end, which is Armando's son. And I thought that was such a beautiful way to tell this story.

9:01What was it like for you as an actor? Was that a role you had to shoot towards the end because you were taking on another character? Tell me about your approach. That was one day only. We shot that in one day, and it was my last day of shooting. So it was a very emotional day. And that was a character that I hadn't, I decided not to think about that. I wanted to live under the skin of his father, of Armando, in order to kind of play the absence of him when I played the kid. because that's what, when I think about that character, I don't think about myself playing it. I think about that little kid.

9:36And I think about a scene that's not in the film that we never shot, which is the scene where he's waiting for his father to show up, to pick him up. And his father never shows up. Yeah, it was a very emotional day. I decided just to show up and do it. You know, and just the way I had the haircut and I was using contact lenses to match the eyes of the little boy. So I felt different, and I started to speak with a different accent from the accent that the father spoke. One of those magical moments. It was a very special day, and we were very, Calabria and I, in the end, we hugged and we cried, you know, that kind of thing.

10:18And that character is a very, it's a lot about also what this film is, of the generational trauma that authoritarian regimes can cause. It's a man that cannot deal with the information that that woman from the future gives to him. It's a very serious problem in Brazil that we still have. We're finally starting to get even with our memory in Brazil when we sent Bolsonaro to jail and people that attempted against democracy to jail for the first time. But in 79, we had this thing called the amnesty law that basically forgave all the torturers and killers that did despicable things against civilians during the dictatorship.

11:03And that caused that lack of memory. Bolsonaro would never have been possible if it wasn't because of that law, for example. So I think that from now on, young Brazilians hopefully will know and will be more aware of how dangerous authoritarian regimes are. You know, you're talking about sort of the emotional release of the last day of shooting this film and how significant making it was to you. But how did it change you as an actor, whether that's the way you approach acting or your technique or your commitment? You know, one thing that I've been more and more conscious about what I do, I think I more or less knew that.

11:48But by playing this character that was so much like a version of myself in a way, I understood that that's basically what actors do. It's like we are constantly playing ourselves or playing versions of ourselves, regardless of the character that you play. Now, with this one, I was very conscious of that. Like, sometimes it was like, it was, I was very Wagner, you know, like, because there were many coincidences and things like that. But I think that every character that an actor plays is sort of like, what would you do if you were there in that situation? You have to have empathy. Even when you play a character, yeah, that real, like, so-called weird character, a character based on someone that really existed, like Pablo Escobar.

12:35There's something that, it's how you see him, right? It's filtered by your emotions and how you see the world. So I think that I became more aware of that with this film. Can you share any of those sort of coincidences you're mentioning that you had in common with this character? This is about a man who was pretty much trying to stick with his values, right? When everything around him was saying the opposite of what he believed. And for a moment there, that's how many Brazilians felt. I imagine, I can only imagine what it was to be like to live in a, like in France when they were invaded by the Germans, you know, and you have to kind of live with that kind of foreign brutal force around you.

13:26How can you be resistant and at the same time keep going with your life and preserve your not to go to jail? How can you consciously suffer the consequences of what you believe and keep going? And I don't want to paint myself as an immoral compass or anything like that. But the older one gets, I think this is what we're pursuing, right? like to be ourselves in life, in social circumstances, and just to be who you are. And that's what I tell my kids, which is like to be who you are. What you are is enough. And of course, they were very cultural, like the fact that we are both from the northeast of Brazil, Cleber and I, I'm from Salvador, he's from Recife, I'm very close to Pernambuco, that state.

14:17And the cultural codes are very, it was very easy for me to understand them. I don't find the hairy leg some weird thing. And for me, it's just like part of the crazy cultural soup, which is Brazil and especially the northeast of the country. Oh, good. I was going to ask you to explain the hairy leg, but, you know. But the hairy leg, the thing about the hairy leg, the hairy leg became a human legend in Recife, right? Especially in the 90s and the 80s. Not many Brazilians knew about it because it was created by journalists of the city that couldn't really put in the newspaper because of the censorship that the police was brutalizing, especially the gay community and other, you know, residents.

15:04and they couldn't say that. So they invented this thing called the hairy leg and they put it in the newspaper. And then people started to believe that there was a hairy leg that was hopping around and kicking people. We're going to take a break. When we get back, how Wagner's politics informed his view of the secret agent.

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17:29Welcome back to Little Gold Men. So although he's from Brazil, Wagner has lived in the U.S. for the last couple of years. And I was curious how he's been taking in this particular moment in America. Here's Wagner. When we released this film called Civil War, I guess two years ago. Yeah, 2024. I was studying a lot about, you know, social conflicts and polarization. And that made me really concerned about the U.S. not about Trump particularly, but about the polarization and all the scholars that study civil wars in the world. You know, the things that they put like, oh, these are the things that can cause social conflicts that can lead to civil wars.

18:14And I started to make comparisons with how Brazil reacted to the insurgency that we had, which was exactly the same thing that happened here. Like Bolsonaro was an election denier, empowered their people to invade the institutions. People did it. But Brazil was very quick in sending people to jail and finding who the financiers were. And Bolsonaro himself is in jail right now. And I started to think about it and I was like, why did that happen? And I don't think that that happened because Brazilian institutions are stronger. Quite the opposite, I think. I think that the fact that Brazilians had a dictatorship, that Brazilians knew what a dictatorship was, made them very aware of like, holy shit, no, this can't happen again.

19:05And back then, I was like, my concern was that, do Americans take democracy for granted? you know do they think that this is something that are given because it's not but then i change my mind i don't i don't think that's the case because this is also the country of civil rights like this is the country of martin luther king it's a country made of people that are used to fight for citizenship and for what they think it's a it's right so it is indeed a very a very scary moment. You know, when you see what's going on in Minneapolis, it's, you go like, this is scary. And just the reaction that people from Minneapolis are, you know, like going to the streets in that, and it must be super cold right now in there.

20:00And just to see the amount of people going to the streets and protesting. And I think that, yeah, this is what we should be doing, I think. And that's the lesson that we, that I understood from coming from a country that had the dictatorship, and not only one, but the one from 64 to 85 is very recent. I was born in 76. Is that authoritarian regimes, they test their limits, you know, and if they don't find resistance, like even if it's like a small thing, you know, they just go. So, yeah, I think that the way people from Minneapolis responded to Trump, but of course, especially after the death of Alex Petrie, I think that you see that the government's sort of like already like changing their discourse about what happened there.

20:51What scares me most with the world, not the U.S., the world, the entire world, is that the idea of truth is kind of over. That facts, they don't matter anymore. And that, I think, that I think is the biggest issue. You know, because when facts don't matter, when people start to live, and then again about polarization, when people start to live in different mental worlds, in different realities, you know, then how can you build a bridge? I've been always a left-wing man, and I used to have fights and discussions with people from the right, but we would be discussing over the same thing. We were seeing the same thing.

21:39Right. That doesn't happen nowadays. We're seeing different things. Yeah. And obviously, the Hollywood part of that is very small, but I always wonder when there's a big platform like the Oscars, do you feel like celebrities need to take that moment to say something political, to share their own feelings? I never bought the idea, the pressure on celebrities to speak up, you know, because I don't think that's even fair. People should speak up if they feel in their bones that they have to, because in order to do that, you have to be aware that there will be consequences. This conversation that I'm having with you right now, I have no doubt that people are, especially given how polarized this world is, some people are going to go, oh, that's interesting.

22:29I kind of agree with what he's saying. And many people are going to go like ballistic. in Brazil, like I'm a, I'm a nature that, that divides opinions. Like, and I choose, that's the thing that I was saying about my, the connection with the character. I decided that I was going to stick with what I believe, you know, we got, I'm not going to be quiet because this is how I feel. I wouldn't sleep well if I was quiet, but there are other people that are not ready to talk and they're not ready to to receive the backlash so i don't think that there should be pressure to do what they don't you know feel yeah i want to look ahead a little bit um you mentioned your previous directorial project what is the status of your next one i believe it's called last night at the lobster where are you in that process yeah we're i think we'll be ready to shoot Because it's a film that has to be shot in the winter.

23:27Okay. And under the snow, and it's like a snowstorm. Can I believe it's a Brazilian directing a film under the snow? It's a Christmas film. It's like in the tradition of the American Christmas movies. But of course, it's also a political film, you know, because it's a film about a group of employees of a chain restaurant that they all get fired a week before Christmas. And I'm going to play the manager of this restaurant and that has to convey the information to the other employees. And I have to choose five of them to take with me to another, which is very cruel and very... But it's a film that I'm very in love with.

24:12It's based on a wonderful book by this great American writer called Stuart Onan. It's called Last Night at the Lobster. And yeah, I work with my great friends, with Sophia Carson, Brian Tyree Henry, Elizabeth Moss, people that I love and they're my friends are going to be there to support me in my first time that I'm going to direct something in English and first time that I'm going to direct and act in something. So I'm excited for that. What does directing give you creatively that you feel like you need alongside acting? I think it gave me a broader, like a bigger view of the process of movie making.

24:55I was, as an actor, I was always very interested in what was going on. What is, what's everybody doing here? You know, I learned what each department of a film does and how they do it. I was always very curious about that, which I think it's great for an actor. As an actor, you kind of understand what the other people on a set are doing. But also, I think it made me a better actor because it was fascinating to see how actors operate, how their minds go and how to deal with them. And sometimes actors, I feel that they're like little kids, like children, you know, that you have to give them love and confidence and self-esteem.

25:41And but also you've got to give them limits. But it's also amazing how many moments I was like directing. I was like, what this actor is giving to me right now is so amazing. The feeling that I had with actors, like when I was directing was the biggest thing was gratitude. gratitude was like, I was grateful for what they were given to me. No one knows a character better than an actor. Even when you write a script and when you go and you direct it, you just have to make the actors accomplish what they think is right for the character. But they know it way better than the writers and the directors.

26:22It's just a beautiful thing to see. I love it. I decided to become an actor when I was 15 because I wanted to hang out with actors. I'm fascinated by, especially theater actors. Theater actors because they have to do it every night in front of an audience or what makes them especially? Yeah, there's that. And then after the play, they go out, you know, they can't sleep. They go have a beer somewhere. And it's a culture. It's a culture that's fascinating. And when I started to work as an actor, working on stage was the only thing possible. You know, coming from the northeast of Brazil, there was no way I was going to be on television or even in films.

27:05So, yeah, that's what I did. But I wanted to be, I remember that I wanted to, I didn't, when I started doing this, I didn't feel that I was particularly talented or that I wanted to do that. I just wanted to be around those people. So I had found, like, I was a very weird teenager. And when I started to hang out with theater people, it was like, oh, these people are my people. Yeah. Theater kids is an international term, I think.

27:40More of my conversation with Wagner Mora after another quick break.

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28:22So, Wagner, outside of filmmaking and acting, what are you passionate about? What sort of keeps you whole or mentally healthy these days? Family, friends, love, affection, true friendship, honest conversations, you know, art, you know, listening to music, watching good films. but especially I think that like yeah I'm so grateful for everything that's going on right now you know with Academy Award nominations and with me for my secret agent for Clever and all of Brazil for Brazilian culture Brazilian films and everything but I'm very aware that this is all this is not real life and I love that you know I love that this real life is when I come back home and I have to drive my kids to school and we talk and I love what I do.