Wagner Moura on The Secret Agent and how he Loves Playing Characters With the Will to Live
By the time Wagner Moura finally read the script for The Secret Agent, it had already been living inside him for years.
The film marks a deeply personal collaboration between Moura and Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, a creative partnership rooted in more than two decades of friendship and shared political unease. Yet despite their closeness, Mendonça Filho refused to show Moura the script until he felt it was fully ready. When Moura finally read it, the experience wasn’t one of surprise so much as recognition.
“I knew what the film was going to be about,” Moura says. “But scripts are the most complicated part of filmmaking. It’s so hard to put everything, ideas, characters, politics, humanity onto the page. I was just very happy.”
That happiness came from seeing a script that refused convention. Mendonça Filho doesn’t guide the audience gently into meaning; instead, The Secret Agent reveals itself gradually, almost defiantly. You don’t fully understand the film until deep into its runtime, and that, Moura believes, is part of its power. Even more striking to him was how faithfully the finished film adhered to the script, scene for scene, an unusual level of precision that spoke to the director’s meticulous vision.
Moura’s character, is a man who survives by remaining unnoticed. From the opening moments pulling into a gas station in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle, carefully monitoring his expressions as police arrive the performance is defined by restraint. Nothing can be external. Everything must live inside.
“That character has to be hidden all the time,” Moura explains. “He cannot call attention to himself. So everything has to be internalized.”
For an actor, that subtlety becomes both challenge and gift. Moura describes the experience as similar to the audience’s own journey through the film: assembling meaning piece by piece, interaction by interaction. He likens it to The Wizard of Oz, with each encounter slowly revealing something new, not just about the world, but about the self moving through it.
This sense of quiet understanding becomes especially potent in the apartment complex where he lives among others who are also hiding. They rarely speak openly, yet everything is communicated. It all exists in glances and silences.
Many of the people populating these scenes aren’t professional actors at all, but friends of Mendonça Filho. For Moura, that created moments of pure instinct. In one early scene with Dona Sebastiana, played by a non-actor, the awe visible on his face isn’t performance, it’s genuine.
“I was very conscious of trying to be as myself as I could,” Moura says. “Of course it’s a character. But it’s also Kleber. And it’s also me.”
One of the film’s most striking choices is its refusal to frame his character as an activist or revolutionary. He isn’t trying to overthrow the system. His very existence, his profession, his values is enough to make him a threat.
“That’s what happens to most people under a dictatorship,” Moura reflects. “They’re just trying to live. To be who they are.”
It’s a perspective Moura knows intimately. After directing Marighella, he faced censorship, backlash, and threats. Those experiences informed his understanding of this role, a man persecuted not for what he does, but for what he represents.
Moura notes that while many films depict dictatorships through overt resistance, this one explores the fringes: the slow suffocation, the way fear reshapes daily behavior, memory, and identity.
Nowhere is that tension clearer than in one of the film’s most moving scenes: where Moura is stepping into Carnival. Just moments earlier, he’s learned that hitmen are looking for him. And yet, surrounded by music and movement, he allows himself a brief surrender dancing, not fully stopping, but letting life pass through him.
“That scene is about the will to live,” Moura says. “Dancing is a manifestation of that will.”
He recalls hearing similar stories from friends in Bogotá during the height of cartel violence and how people still went out, still danced, still lived. Human beings, he believes, possess a remarkable capacity to insist on life even in the face of terror.
Late in the film, Moura takes on a second role as his character’s son, years later. The choice to have Moura embody both men underscores the film’s preoccupation with memory and absence. The son is shaped by what he never knew, a father erased not just physically, but narratively, smeared by false headlines and official lies.
Moura deliberately avoided thinking about this second character until just days before shooting, wanting first to fully inhabit the father. What emerges is a man still frozen in childhood, still waiting.
Films, Moura believes, are always dialogues between artists and their moment in history. And The Secret Agent arrives at a time when memory long suppressed is finally being reclaimed.
In its silences, its strange details, its refusal to explain itself neatly, the film insists on something radical: to remember is an act of resistance. And to live, to dance, to love, to persist is sometimes the bravest act of all.
Watch the full conversation below:
Q&A on the film The Secret Agent with actor Wagner Moura. Moderated by Mara Webster, In Creative Company.
