WAGNER MOURA SHARES A ‘SECRET’

The acclaimed actor says he's 'explosive' regarding injustice. He's blowing up too

- BY CARLOS AGUILAR

The stakes are high for the characters that Brazilian actor Wagner Moura takes on.

Caught in the grip of challenging sociopolitical backdrops, his magnetic and brooding men—whether bold authority figures, conflicted everyday guys, notorious outlaws or those in positions of power — represent an affront to the status quo. And so does he.

“Regarding injustice, I'm usually explosive and that reflects in the kind of characters that I play,” Moura tells me sitting at Neon's offices on a rainy Los Angeles afternoon in November. “There's this energy and this will to break s-down in a lot of them.”

Moura has just arrived back in L.A., where he spends most of his time with his three children and wife, photographer Sandra Delgado, after concluding a run of “A Trial — After An Enemy of the People” on stage in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Brazil. The play is a modern-day update to Henrik Ibsen's “An Enemy of the People,” conceived by Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy.

His theater engagement overlapped with the fall festivals he attended to present “The Secret Agent,” a Brazilian thriller set in the city of Recife during the 1970s, when the country was under a military dictatorship.

In the genre-bending period knockout from Kleber Mendonça Filho — one of Brazil's leading filmmakers — Moura plays Armando, a grieving widower on the run who joins a community of people hiding from their pasts in trying times. Under a new name, he works toward finding an escape for him and his young son, but the powerful bigot he stood up against in his former life as a scientist is getting closer to finding him. A simple man must become a stealth operative in order to survive.

“I love that this is not a film about someone who's trying to overthrow the government — he’s just a guy who sticks with his values, with who he is,” Moura says about his part. His salt-and-pepper short hair and beard confer an air of seasoned, handsome ruggedness.