Acting Up: Wagner Moura’s Performance In ‘The Secret Agent’

The Snapshot: In 1977 Brazil, a former professor and tech expert on the run from the country’s military dictatorship hides out in his hometown during Carnival, but finds out that it’s not as safe as he’d hoped.

(The Secret Agent is currently showing in theaters)

The Performance: It’s not often you can honestly and seriously talk about an actor giving a master class in something on screen. Not accurately, anyway. The term “master class” is thrown around a lot, pell-mell and willy-nilly, but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Same with “masterpiece,” for that matter. Folks can and do get hyperbolic about things they like, or things that impress them, or stuff that makes them think, and they throw around superlatives that don’t actually apply.

Key Insights

Wagner Moura delivers a rare, quietly stunning performance built on control, restraint, and emotional precision rather than overt dramatics.

The Secret Agent unfolds slowly, revealing character, motive, and danger only in measured increments that mirror Moura’s tightly guarded portrayal.

Moura’s approach transforms suspense into character study, keeping audiences gripping for information rather than action.

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When an actual masterpiece is made, or an actual master class is given, we should pay attention, because they really don’t happen as much as we’d like. This is why what Wagner Moura gives us in his performance as the star of The Secret Agent is so important, should be recognized, and yes, even treasured.

Starting from the first moment of The Secret Agent, we don’t have any idea who Moura’s Marcelo is. Good guy? Bad guy? Drifter? Lost soul? He’s driving a beat-up car from Rio de Janeiro to his hometown of Recife, and he’s been driving for three days.

When a local police officer tries to shake him down, we learn that he has just spent the last cent he has on gas, and all he can offer to the crooked cop is a half pack of cigarettes. So the first thing we know about Marcelo is that he’s got nothing, but we still don’t know why that is, or when we’ll find out.

The answer to both of those things we learn gradually. It’s not until roughly halfway through the film’s 160-minute running time that we start to get an understanding of who Marcelo is, why he has come back to the small city of Recife, and what he’s running from, as well as the fact that his real name is actually Armando.

Part of that is because of the way writer-director Kleber Mendoça Filho has structured the telling of the story, but — and here’s where the master class thing comes into play — a bigger part is how Moura gives literally nothing away in his performance. There is no sense of desperation, no sense of panic, no sense of urgency, nothing that might make us sense that he is in some serious danger, because he stays perfectly within himself in his performance.

“Staying within yourself” is another cliche, but this is one of those cases where it applies. Moura’s ability to hide his emotions, while also showing a fanatical determination, is hypnotic. It’s mesmerizing. Moura slowly doles out bits and pieces, allowing us inside only a little at a time.

We see the first crack when he lays eyes on his eight-year-old son for the first time in months. We see it again when he has to remind his son that the boy’s mother, Marcelo’s wife, died of cancer. As the story continues, he allows us more small pieces, a bit at a time, until everything finally becomes clear, and he has made us earn it.

By the time the movie reaches that halfway point and the scope of how Marcelo/Armando ended up in this situation, and what he’s running from starts to clarify, we already know that a bad man has hired a couple of hit men to track down Marcelo/Armando and kill him, so it’s not like we are completely unaware of what he’s facing. The thing about that is, we’re still not 100 percent sure that he’s the good guy. Or, lacking that understanding, that he’s not also a bad guy.

To say more about the plot is to risk spoiling it, but suffice it to say that Moura spends the running time revealing to the audience what he wants us to see. That’s not as easy as it sounds. The inclination is to emote, to give the audience something, to let them know that an actor is, y’know, acting.

That’s not what Moura does here. He has the confidence in the material, and in his representation of the character, to let things play out naturally. It’s a performance of enormous power in its stillness, perfectly serving its purpose in the process. With each scene, in every moment, the viewer creeps a tiny bit forward in their seat, waiting for more to be revealed and for the suspense to pay off.

Thanks in large part to Moura’s work, it does.

The Career: Brazilian actor Wagner Moura was a presence in his home country’s film and television industry for years before he had something of an international breakout. As a young man, he starred on successful TV shows like Once in a Blue Moon and JK, and in the Elite Squad film franchise, and got his first English-language role in the 2013 Matt Damon-led sci-fi flick Elysium. But it was two years later, when he was cast as Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series Narcos, that he really hit the big time.

Gaining weight and learning Spanish for the role (Brazilians, it should be noted, speak Portuguese), he earned a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination for his work, and suddenly, he was on the radar of casting directors outside of his native country.

While he kept working steadily at home, he was also being cast in the Apple TV series Shining Girls and Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the action flick The Gray Man, the animated sequel Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and director Alex Garland cast him as the male lead in the 2024 dystopian thriller Civil War. He also starred alongside another rising star, Oscar and Emmy nominee Brian Tyree Henry, in another Apple TV series, Dope Thief.

All of that has been a prelude to the master class he puts on in The Secret Agent, which won him the Best Actor prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and for which he has since been nominated for a Golden Globe. His first Oscar nod is surely next, and from there, one can only assume more greatness.

Key Takeaways

This is a career-defining performance that cements Moura as one of the most compelling actors working today.

His mastery of internal character work elevates the film’s tension and rewards patient storytelling.

With accolades mounting and awards momentum building, Moura’s global stardom looks primed to reach its fullest height.