Oscar nominee Wagner Moura: ‘I didn’t want to keep playing drug dealers. Latinos are way more than that’

The ‘Narcos’ star once faced censorship from Brazil’s then president Jair Bolsonaro, and is now the plucky underdog of this year’s Best Actor Oscar race. He speaks to Tom Murray about fighting stereotypes, the political importance of ‘The Secret Agent’, and violence in Trump’s America

Moura: ‘When you watch The Secret Agent, I kind of feel like I’m playing myself sometimes’ (Getty)

Just two days ago, Wagner Moura was dancing the samba at a Golden Globes afterparty. He’d beaten the likes of Michael B Jordan and Oscar Isaac to become the first ever Brazilian to win the award for Best Actor in a Drama. Still a bit delirious, he was shoved on a plane to London the next day – and now he’s speaking to me over Zoom. In a matter of hours, he’ll be gone again, on to the next stop of the press tour. “It’s brutal, man,” he says, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

The 49-year-old is on the campaign trail for The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s blackly funny drama about an academic attempting to flee Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Moura doesn’t know it yet, but there’ll be no respite. It’s become an unexpected awards magnet, earning four Oscar nominations (including Best Picture and Best International Feature Film) since our conversation.

Speaking to him, I’m reminded of the hollow-eyed look that settled over Cillian Murphy during the seemingly endless press run for Oppenheimer in 2024. Moura – best known for his transformative turn as Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos – has the air of someone who is deeply committed to the work, and far less enamoured with everything that comes after. But, he reminds himself, it’s not often that a Brazilian film – in Portuguese, no less – receives such international acclaim. “Every time I’m tired, I go, ‘Come on, man, this doesn’t happen all the time,’” he says. “‘This is great.’”

Moura is indeed Oscar-worthy as Marcelo, a widowed father on the run after his morals get the better of him during dinner with a corrupt government minister. His wife, it is implied, paid the price with her life. Marcelo is not a revolutionary, but he is precisely the kind of ordinary intellectual who vanished under a regime defined by censorship, distrust of academia, and the systematic persecution of those who fell out of line.

Moura inhabits the role with the captivating presence of a quietly principled man, his grief simmering in the background, his son’s survival the sole thing sustaining him. The tension is punctuated by small, absurdist touches – including a recurring joke about a disembodied zombie limb called Hairy Leg that’s wreaking havoc in the local area. It’s a reminder that life under a dictatorship can be terrifying and ridiculous in equal measure.

Moura was just a child during that period, which stretched from 1964 to 1985, but “it doesn’t feel that it happened that long ago”, he says. “It feels like the logic of the dictatorship is still very present in Brazil right now. Brazil is extraordinary, cultural, diverse, progressive, empathetic and beautiful... but also, it was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, with a history of coups d’état, violence, elitism, colonialism, imperialism. These things are still very present in our day-to-day lives.”

Bolsonaro was an election denier, like Trump, and invaded the institutions in Brazil just like the Americans [have done in the US]. But Brazil did something that the Americans didn’t, because Bolsonaro is in jail right now

The Secret Agent, Moura tells me, came about due to a “perplexity” he and Filho shared about life under Jair Bolsonaro. For four years, the despotic president attempted to roll back decades of progress in Brazil. Both Moura and Filho were vilified as communists.

Back in 2019, Moura had made a film about Carlos Marighella, a Marxist guerrilla leader assassinated by the military regime in the late Sixties. Bolsonaro’s government denied the film funding and effectively blocked it from appearing in cinemas until 2021. A few years earlier, Filho had been denounced by the right after he and the cast of his 2016 film, Aquarius, used its Cannes premiere to protest against the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the country’s first female president and a leftist reformer. It was later blocked from being Brazil’s official Oscar submission.

“We would call each other at night, going like, ‘Dude, how can we react to this thing? How can we support each other?’” Moura remembers. “When you watch The Secret Agent, I kind of feel like I’m playing myself sometimes,” he says. “It was very obvious that I was talking about something that I knew well.”

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Moura has a voice that’s hard to ignore – a deep, locomotive rumble. Filho recently compared it to having built-in Dolby Atmos. There is something about his eyes, too. With just a look, he can hold an entire emotional history suspended in a single, seemingly unguarded moment. It’s part of the reason his turn as Escobar was so revelatory. For two seasons of Narcos, it felt like we had a genuine glimpse into the psyche of the world’s most dangerous man.

Moura forced us to sympathise with him, like Tony Soprano with a handlebar moustache. “I think I’ve realised that the more you show yourself, the more you’re vulnerable as an actor,” he says. “That’s what I think strong performances should be.”

Moura has become an unlikely Oscar frontrunner for his role as a man on the run in ‘The Secret Agent’ (Mubi)

He keeps notebooks for every character he plays, and at some point inevitably finds himself writing: “This character is you.” Even when he’s playing a drug lord, “it’s how I see him. It’s filtered by my sensibility. I’m not him. It’s how I see him.”

After Narcos, it would have been easy for Moura’s career to veer onto a more commercial trajectory. Just look at his old co-star Pedro Pascal, now one of Hollywood’s most inescapable leading men. “That’s honestly not my cup of tea,” he says of the big-budget franchises like Fantastic Four that Pascal now headlines. “After Narcos, I was mostly getting offers to play the same kind of character. That’s how Hollywood operates,” he says. They wanted him to stick to drug barons. Moura saw the trap. “That’s a stereotype of Latinos,” he tells me. “The violent drug dealer... We are way more than that. This is something that I take really seriously – it’s representation, how we’re seen in the US.”

Instead, the actor has stuck to idiosyncratic projects, like Alex Garland’s 2024 Civil War, which Moura anchored with a scene-stealing performance as a seasoned war reporter, and the Apple TV series Dope Thief, in which he played an embattled conman. “Characters that are not connected to some sort of idea of what a Latin man should be,” as Moura describes them.

Bad hombres: Moura transformed into ‘King of cocaine’ Pablo Escobar for two seasons of Netflix’s ‘Narcos’ (Netflix)

The topic of Latino representation has perhaps never been more pertinent. In 2015, Donald Trump famously said of all Mexicans: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” His rhetoric has hardly softened during his second term as president.

My conversation with Moura frequently returns to politics, less by choice and more by gravitational pull. Living in Los Angeles with his wife and three teenage children, he has watched the US convulse with protest over Trump’s hardline immigration policies. It’s hard not to see echoes of The Secret Agent in the turmoil. In the opening scene, a pair of ICE-type goons scrutinise Marcelo’s ID at a petrol station before asking for a bribe. The difference, Moura suggests, is historical awareness.

“Bolsonaro was an election denier, like Trump, and invaded the institutions in Brazil just like the Americans [have done in the US]. But Brazil did something that the Americans didn’t, because Bolsonaro is in jail right now. I think we did that because Brazilians know what a dictatorship is, whereas Americans take it for granted.”

Moura with his Best Actor award at last month’s Golden Globes (Getty)

Not every role Moura takes on comes with such a weighty message, though. In 2022, he gave voice to a sinister wolf in the animated Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. His face lights up when I mention it. “That was so fun, man,” he says, grinning. “It’s the nature of what this job is supposed to be. We can never lose that as artists.”

It’s helped his street cred with youngsters, too. He recently shot a forthcoming Netflix thriller called 11817 with Past Lives’ Greta Lee and two child actors in Surrey. “When the kids discovered that I was the wolf in Puss in Boots” – he mimics their minds exploding – “I was their hero!”.

He’s approaching the job with a new mindset as he prepares to turn 50. “I don’t want to do anything, or say anything, or behave in a way that’s not coherent to what I think,” he says. “I think that as time goes on, you [find that you] don’t have much time for bulls***. I want joy and happiness, and I want to laugh, and I want to be with people that I love.”

What more could one ask for – except, perhaps, an Oscar?

‘The Secret Agent’ is in cinemas from 20 February