When Wagner Moura’s name was called at the Golden Globes, he became the first Brazilian man to take home the trophy for Best Film Drama Actor. For Moura, the moment itself is now a beautiful, adrenaline-fueled blur.
“I don’t remember the walk from the table to the stage,” he admits, recalling only a beaming Julia Roberts embrace him as he approached the podium. His main focus was the ticking clock: “I was very concerned about the time of what I had to say. So it was like, ‘OK, breathe and say your thing. Don’t waste your time here.’” Earlier that night, The Secret Agent also won Best Non-English Film. “It was such a perfect night,” Moura says.
An International Feature race that feels different
From Cannes to the Critics Choice Awards to the Golden Globes, The Secret Agent has become one of the defining international films of the season — even if Moura prefers to let awards pundits do the Oscar forecasting. “You tell me, you are a specialist in these things,” he jokes with Gold Derby. “Is it looking good?”
What he does know is that this year’s Best International Feature race feels unusually warm, particularly within Neon’s powerhouse slate that includes Sentimental Value, It Was Just an Accident, No Other Choice, and Sirât. “I remember when they acquired all these films, I was like, ‘How is this going to work?’” he says. “We are sort of competing against each other somehow, but they managed to do this in such a classy, beautiful, and professional way. Everybody is having a great time.”
That sense of camaraderie has turned awards season into something more like a rolling international film festival. Moura says he keeps bumping into the same group of filmmakers everywhere he goes — and many of them are now becoming friends. “I’m happy to say that I think that Jafar Panahi is becoming a friend of mine … Joachim Trier and all the actors from Sentimental Value, Oliver Laxe from Sirât, they’re all great people.”
He’s quick to note that he also loves many of the American contenders this year — especially One Battle After the Other — but he beams when talking about what global cinema is bringing to the table. “The international film this year are great,” he says. “We are among a very beautiful and great group of filmmakers, actors, and producers from outside the U.S.”
“The Guy From Bahia Has the Sauce”
Back home, Moura’s awards-season run has ignited the same kind of national pride that surrounded Fernanda Torres on her way to an Oscar nomination for I’m Still Here last year. Brazilian fans have flooded social media, and one phrase in particular has followed him all the way to Los Angeles: “O baiano tem o molho” — “The guy from Bahia has the sauce.”
Moura laughs at how far it’s traveled. “I can’t believe that that traveled from Salvador to you in L.A.,” he says. “The sauce is like … there is some sauce in that part of the country.” For people from Bahia, his home state in Brazil’s Northeast, it’s a playful expression of confidence and cultural pride. “Our self-esteem is very high up there,” he adds. “People from Bahia, we really enjoy being from there and we are very proud of where we come from … it’s not arrogant, just like, yeah, we’re cool.”
The politics of The Secret Agent
Moura and writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho have known each other for more than two decades, but The Secret Agent arrived at a moment when both felt compelled to speak out. During the rise of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, they were outspoken critics — a stance that came with real risk. “We were both very vocal against Bolsonaro,” Moura says. “And it was a time that being vocal against him was… you would suffer consequences.” Setting the film during Brazil’s 1977 dictatorship, he adds, was not merely a historical choice but an urgent one. “He was talking about one of the worst times of Brazilian history when we were living in a moment where someone was trying to bring those values back to Brazil in the 21st century.”
For Moura, Armando’s story is ultimately about moral resistance. “The character that I play is a guy who sticks with his values when everything around him says the opposite.” Those ideas feel increasingly resonant in a polarized world where truth itself is under strain. “I remember a time where the right and the left… we would be talking about the same facts,” he says. “Nowadays facts don’t matter anymore. Everybody has their own version of the reality.”
Disappearance, propaganda, and Carnaval
The film’s most devastating thread — a father erased from his child’s life — reflects a painful reality across much of South America. “People would just disappear,” Moura says. “There’s no one you could ask, ‘Hey, what happened?’ … You just suck it up and spend the rest of your life thinking, ‘What happened to that person?’” In The Secret Agent, Armando is destroyed twice: once physically, and again through lies. “They really killed him and then they killed his reputation,” Moura explains.
For all its political weight, The Secret Agent is filled with joy, absurdity, and surreal imagery — from Carnaval sequences to the infamous “hairy leg.” Moura sees that tonal mix as profoundly human. “People under tough circumstance still have that will to live,” he says. “They were going out, they were going to bars, they were having fun — and then bam, a bomb would explode.”
One of his favorite moments captures that contradiction perfectly: Armando, in danger, slipping into the chaos of a carnival. “He just gives himself to Carnaval,” Moura says. “You get to these points where things can be like, ‘Yeah, my life is completely f–ked’ … but when I go downstairs, Carnaval is going on.” The messiness, the humor, and the contradictions are what make the story feel alive.
After Narcos, Civil War, and now The Secret Agent, Moura finds himself at a rare crossroads: a globally recognized actor whose most meaningful work remains rooted in history, politics, and human vulnerability. Yet even as awards season accelerates, his focus remains firmly on the collaboration that brought him here.
“I love Kleber Mendonça Filho,” Moura says. “I think I want to keep working with this guy as much as I can.” With The Secret Agent now carrying real momentum into the Oscars, it’s clear that this partnership — and the story they chose to tell — has connected far beyond Brazil. For Moura, that may be the most meaningful win of all.