Wagner Moura didn’t always want to be an actor. It wasn’t some preternatural destiny he knew was his growing up, or a thing that came to him at a particular moment in time that changed his life forever. There’s no fairytale arrival into the arts for him. No — his arrival into the world of storytelling is much simpler than that, something infinitely more relatable to any of the thousands who’ve seen him on screen in his career: he wanted to hang out with the cool kids.
It certainly seems to have worked out in his favor. As I sit across from him on Zoom, I’m silently thinking that he is one of the cool kids now — someone I watched throughout college and the early years of my career, in projects that helped shape me as a critic. It’s the afternoon of Easter Monday for both of us — well, afternoon for me, in my home office in Pennsylvania, but early evening for Moura in the UK, where he’s currently filming 11817 with Greta Lee. It’s a bank holiday there, and we commiserate over how frustrating it is when everything closes early and you’re left with not much to do — except talk about his career, of course.
I’m fascinated to learn that, like many kids, he got into theater as a teen — not because of a burning passion on stage, but because he was drawn to the people that he saw in the scene. It resonates with me, someone who desperately searched for a kind of belonging in my own high school drama club — and probably for anyone else who found solace in the arts — and I understand what he means when he says the teenagers he performed with were a different breed than his regular classmates.
“It was more like a social interest than an artistic call or anything. I didn’t really feel that I was particularly talented,” Moura tells me, an amusing statement in the face of all he’s achieved since. “I just wanted to because I didn’t connect with anyone at my school. I was a very shy kid, and, weirdly enough, when I was doing the plays, I liked it… I just felt like I really wanted to hang out with those people. I wanted to be around those people. I just thought that I had found the people that I was interested in.”
The Role That Made Brazil — and the World — Take Notice

Photography by Yellowbelly for Collider

Eventually, though, it stuck. After years of treading the boards in theater, Moura made his cinematic breakout in Elite Squad, a 2007 Brazilian film where he played a member of the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro. Based on the novel Elite da Tropa, written by Luiz Eduardo Soares alongside former police officers André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel, the film was a cultural phenomenon in Brazil and around the world, winning the prestigious Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. Even more, it made Moura a household name back home — he was even named Vogue Brazil’s “Man of the Year” in 2007, shortly after the film’s release.
The film’s success shot Moura to new heights. After returning for Elite Squad 2 in 2010, he broke out into Hollywood with Elysium, the dystopian sci-fi epic directed by Neil Blomkamp about refugees attempting to escape to an artificial world as the Earth crumbles around them. (It was that second Elite Squad film that landed him the role, for the record.)
Alongside massive names like Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, and Diego Luna, Moura played the hacker Spider, a small but instrumental role that would lead him into the wild and wonderful world of Hollywood, where he’s made a name for himself playing everything from drug kingpins to war photographers.
Acting Was Never Part of the Plan

But even though the rest is history for us as an audience, it took a while for the actor to go full-time and become… well, an actor. After college, he worked for a while as a journalist — a career he’d ironically go on to portray in both Alex Garland’s Civil War and the series Shining Girls. It’s a chapter he still looks back on with an awful lot of fondness, especially given the state of the industry today.
“[Working on those] made me think about journalism itself, which I think is such an important pillar of democracy,” he says, all the conviction still there from years of doing what I’m doing right now. “It’s in such a big crisis nowadays. All my journalist friends are complaining a lot about, ‘This is a business that might end at some point.’ It’s very scary to me, the idea that information, that the truth as we know it, is about to end. Fact-checking, that kind of thing that you learn when you go to journalism school, is over. People are getting information through social media. So, I was very proud to have played two journalists.”
Like most kids who go into the arts instead of pursuing a steadier career, Moura’s parents were hesitant about his decision to act full-time. His father, a sergeant, would have preferred he become a “lawyer or a doctor” — something more secure. It’s a tale as old as time, and exactly the reason Moura didn’t dive headfirst into acting immediately.

Just do something that you’re passionate about.

“I didn’t want to disappoint them somehow,” he muses, looking back on those early years when he was working as a journalist during the day and heading to theater rehearsals in the evenings. “My parents made an effort for me to go to school and study, so becoming an actor was like…” He laughs a bit then, in that exasperated way that suggests that, as a parent himself now, he understands where his parents were coming from.
He certainly isn’t bitter about it, especially not since his parents came around to the idea of his face on their TV screen once he found stable jobs. His father, he says, came to see him play Hamlet in Brazil upwards of 10 times, a memory he’s held very dear since his passing in 2011. “They were just concerned about my future,” Moura adds. “It was just love.”
It’s that same kind of love that motivates him, now nearly 20 years on from Elite Squad, to tell his kids to chase their dreams. Having achieved his own, he’s confident enough to tell them to pursue what speaks to them, regardless of success or fame: “Sometimes one of my kids will be like, “Yeah, but will we make money?” and I tell them, just forget about it, man. Just don’t think about that. Just do something that you’re passionate about.”
Mastering the Art of Saying Yes for ‘Dope Thief’

It’s a noble pronouncement, especially since his kids have one hell of a success story to look up to. Since Elite Squad, Moura’s worked with an incredible stable of creatives, from Foster and Damon on Elysium to folks like Penélope Cruz, Kirsten Dunst, the Russo Brothers, Elisabeth Moss, and Alicia Vikander in recent years. This year alone, he’s already starred in Apple TV+’s Dope Thief with Brian Tyree Henry.
Based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Tafoya, the series, which just recently concluded its debut season, follows two best friends who find themselves in over their heads when an outlandish scheme lands them in the sights of the federal government. Moura tells me a wonderful story from that set about director Ridley Scott, who rolled up on him in the makeup trailer when he was getting his hair dyed to play Manny, one of the show’s two con artists who pose as DEA agents to rob drug dealers. “It was the weirdest thing,” he says, sporting a huge smile as he remembers the experience.
“My hair had all these things that you put in to dye your hair — those [foils] — and Ridley Scott was [there]. I was a little nervous, and then I started to ask him questions about Blade Runner and Alien, and Thelma & Louise, and how did he make them, and he was happily answering me, every single question, and he was so excited about telling me all these things in such a generous way.”
He says that Scott’s experience lent itself to a sense of “confidence and calm” on set — unsurprising, given the 87-year-old’s decades of moviemaking. According to Moura, the Alien director shoots “really fast,” with upwards of six cameras running at once. “Shooting with six cameras, for me, was like, “What?” he recalls. “It was a very surreal experience because it was moving real, real, real fast. My first day, I didn’t even know what was going on.”
That doesn’t mean Scott was ignorant of his actors’ needs, however. Even though most shots could be landed in one take with multiple cameras running, Moura says he’d offer him and other stars another go if they felt they needed it. “I’d go, “Yes, Mr. Ridley Scott, I would like another one,” he laughs, clearly still in awe that he worked with the Oscar-nominated director — and kept up with him, to boot.
“He was really sweet to me,” Moura adds. “Because he called me, like two or three days after the first week, to say, “Hey, mate, I’m editing this thing and it’s really good. It’s coming along. It’s great. You’re great in it.” So, that’s the kind of thing where you’re like, “Ridley Scott called me to say that everything is great!”

Something in [Peter Craig’s] voice felt like I should do the experience and put myself in that situation.

That kind of support and attitude from his director was a boon for the Brazilian actor, who joined the show only four days before it began shooting in Philadelphia. “That was the kind of thing that I’d never done before. I take preparation really seriously,” he notes. (And who wouldn’t?) “I’ve never had an invitation like that before. It was usually, you get a call, like, “We’re doing this in three or four months,” and then you’re like, “Cool,” and you prepare. I never had that. My first instinct was to say no.”
In fact, we might not have seen Moura in Dope Thief at all if it weren’t for his co-star Henry, who phoned him up after he was initially hesitant with Scott and director Peter Craig: “It wasn’t a Zoom call, it was just a phone call, and he was like, “Hey, man, I’m an actor, too. I know it’s a lot. What we’re asking you is too much. I respect you too much.” I remember him saying that: “I respect you too much to ask you to do this. I totally understand it.” Then, somehow, when I was talking to him, I felt like, “I think I should do this.” I don’t know exactly what it was I felt. Something in his voice felt like I should do the experience and put myself in that situation. As an actor, as an artist, go there and do something that you have never done before. Put yourself in this. And it was great.”
Moura says he and Henry developed a friendship quickly after meeting — a dynamic that shines through in their on-screen relationship. “All deep friendships are complex, but honesty is a very important thing,” he says, “and I think that my relationship with Brian was like that.” For such a fast-moving project, he slipped right in without a hitch.
The 40-Pound Gamble That Changed Everything

Image via Netflix

Despite Scott’s reassurances, it was actually a different project that Moura credits with helping him find the confidence to jump into the deep end with Dope Thief. I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up Narcos – the Netflix series about Pablo Escobar and the DEA agents who tracked him down, which put him on the map for English-speaking audiences. (It also boosted the profile of his co-star Pedro Pascal, whose star shot so high that it traveled to a galaxy far, far away.) Moura gained 40 pounds to play the Colombian drug kingpin and spent an extended period living in the country before anyone else arrived to really get a feel for things.
“I think I spent, like, three months before everybody else just living in Colombia, learning Spanish and going to school, trying to speak Spanish and reading about Pablo,” Moura recalls. “It sounds contradictory, but that experience in Narcos was like, “Okay, I think you can do the opposite now. Just show up.” So, I think the fact that I did that crazy thing in Narcos kind of gave me the confidence to do the opposite — no preparation. It was something that, now, when I look back, I’m like, “Everything is possible.”

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I interrogate him further about learning to speak Spanish — his third language, after Portuguese and English — in such a condensed period of time, purely because I’ve been curious about it since I first saw the series, and even now, though it continues to serve him as an actor, Moura still can’t quite believe he managed any of it.
“When I think about this now, it’s like, “What was I thinking?” he jokes. “What was this director thinking that they hired me to play that part?” But he looks back on the series fondly, as something that not only taught him a lot but opened him up to immense opportunity: “I think about it as a very important part of my life as a human being, but also, of course, it was probably the most popular thing that I did. I go to any place in the world, and people go, “Oh, Pablo Escobar!” And that’s cool. For an actor, that’s great.”
A Wolf in the Spotlight, a Father at Home

Photography by Yellowbelly for Collider

Moura’s got more than just Pablo Escobar under his belt, though. His child co-stars on 11817, for instance, are constantly asking him to do the voice of the Wolf from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. “These kids love you,” Lee told him — and his own kids do too. A giant wolf who’s also the animated manifestation of Death isn’t such a far cry from the intense characters he’s usually associated with, but it’s one that’s earned him a lot of love and recognition alongside co-stars like Antonio Banderas and Florence Pugh.
I joke that I didn’t recognize him when I first watched the movie — mostly because I’d only ever heard him speak Spanish or Portuguese on film — and Moura admits that the experience helped free him from the anxiety of performing in a language other than his native one.
“When I started working in English [and] in Spanish and not in Portuguese, you get a little self-conscious about, “Am I pronouncing these words correctly? Am I sounding weird?” he says, which surprises me, as someone who’s spent our entire conversation thinking about how eloquent he sounds. “I think Puss in Boots kind of freed me from that because I was like, “Okay, I’m going to show up and I’m going to have fun. No one’s really seeing me.” You can play. I’m trying to bring this feeling of the voice work to the live-action thing, because when you’re doing voice work, at least I don’t really care. I just play and improvise and say weird shit.”
“Weird shit” or not, Moura made a huge splash as the Wolf when the film premiered, and it continues to be touted as one of the greatest animated films of all time. He’s clearly incredibly proud of it, and proud to have played a role that teaches children such a valuable lesson about what we do with the time we’re given. “[It’s] the idea of doing something with your life…about doing something that you love with your life,” he muses, recalling what he told his own kids. “The cat has nine lives, but people don’t, so do something with it. Because the thing that we know for certain is that we’re all going to die at some point.”
Moura adds that he’d love to do something with that character in the future — maybe a sequel, I pitch, since you never know with studio IP and franchises these days. That gets a laugh out of him, and he coyly tells me that he’s working on another voiceover project at the moment. Though he won’t spill any details, it’s obvious he’s excited about it: “It’s very cool. I’m loving it.”
From there, our conversation drifts to his next big project: The Secret Agent, premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and co-starring Udo Kier and Gabriel Leone, it marks Moura’s first Portuguese-language film (excluding directing Marighella in 2017) since 2012. Moura stars in the Palme d’Or-nominated project as Marcelo, a teacher who finds himself caught up in the last dredges of the military dictatorship in Brazil. When he attempts to escape his mysterious past by fleeing to the capital city of Recife, he finds not refuge, but even more trouble, as the urban capital turns out to be the exact opposite of what he was hoping for.

The cat has nine lives, but people don’t, so do something with it.

Even though I only speak English, I understand what he means when he says he has a connection to his native language in a way that just isn’t possible with either of the others he speaks. Having starred primarily in major Hollywood projects in the last handful of years (with his resume also touting The Gray Man and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, among other things), The Secret Agent marks a return to Moura’s roots for the first time in a decade, especially linguistically.
“There is a relationship with your mother tongue that you cannot replicate,” he says. “It’s different. When I say something in Portuguese, the words come filled with memories that I don’t have when I speak English words. When I say a word in English, sometimes I feel that I have to fill that word with a memory that I really don’t have when I say it.”
Moura is also a massive fan of Filho, whom he jokes he’s been “basically stalking” to get a chance at working with him. He’s got nothing but praise for the director, a former critic he met at Cannes years ago. “This guy fascinates me,” he says, with all the fervor of a film student talking about their newfound love for Scorsese or Tarantino. “He directed three feature films and one documentary only, and I’m crazy about all of them. They’re called Neighboring Sounds, then Aquarius, and then Bacurau, which won the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes three years ago, and another, a documentary called Pictures of Ghosts. He’s so unique and is such a great artist, and so Brazilian.”
Neighboring Sounds, like Moura notes, was Filho’s feature-length debut after years of making short films, which went on to become Brazil’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards. His third film, Bacurau, won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019, and The Secret Agent, coming to this year’s festival, is almost a kismet moment for both the director and Moura, the latter reveals.
“It was so liberating,” he says of The Secret Agent, which Filho also wrote. “We shot it in a very particular city in Brazil that’s very important for me, called Recife, in the northeast of Brazil. I was so happy, man. And now the film is going to be in Cannes, and I’m just excited about it.”
He smiles, thinking back to their first encounter. “This is interesting because this director, Kleber, used to be a critic. The first time I met him, my first memory of talking to him, he was still a critic; he wasn’t directing yet. He was in Cannes when I was in Cannes with a film back in 2003. So, it feels like everything is connected.”
Reigniting His Roots

The way Moura speaks suggests his creative future is already mapped out for the long haul — and if he’s got any plans of slowing down any time soon, he certainly doesn’t show any indication of it. In fact, he practically levitates out of his chair with excitement as he gives me a list of what he’s working on next, a verbal CVS receipt of projects ranging from a new Netflix thriller to a return to the stage for the first time in decades.
He tells me a bit about working on 11817, directed by Fast X helmer Louis Leterrier, where he plays one half of a couple alongside Lee, whom he “really admires.” The two star as the head of a small family who end up trapped in their tiny apartment during a mysterious disaster, along with their two children, whom Moura says he loves working with. He can’t tell me much about the film as it stands, but there’s an air to the way he speaks that tells me the simple logline for 11817 is definitely meant to keep us guessing.
After that wraps, though, is when the real fun starts for him. “I’m going to go to Brazil, and I’m going to go to my hometown, and I’m going to go do theater there,” he gushes, though he didn’t specify what play he’ll be starring in. “I’m very excited about that. It’s going to be a super-fast run. I’ll be there for three months. But I want to do this in my hometown in Salvador, where I started when my parents weren’t sure about what I should do.”
It all circles back to that — the love his parents surrounded him with, even if it wasn’t the most encouraging, and the place where he discovered his career, even if all he wanted was to make some friends. Oftentimes, love — for a medium or some other intangible thing — is what motivates an artist to take up what they do, but keeping that love around can be tough. Moura’s found a way around that by keeping his roots firmly planted in Bahia and never forgetting where his success came from.
But he’s definitely not done with Hollywood yet either. He’s also dipping his toe back into directing, something he did a few times pre- and mid-pandemic. He helmed a few episodes of Narcos: Mexico, the spin-off series that starred Diego Luna as drug lord Félix Gallardo, and his directorial debut, Marighella, told the story of the eponymous politician, writer, and guerilla fighter Carlos Marighella, who was accused of terrorism against the military dictatorship in Brazil before being assassinated in 1969. This time, he’s taking a complete one-eighty to direct The Last Night at the Lobster, an English-language adaptation of Stewart O’Nan’s novella of the same name, about the last shift of a seafood restaurant in New England. Moura will also be directing himself, a hurdle he has yet to clear, but he’s optimistic about the outcome.
“We’ll be shooting this in the winter because it’s a film that has to take place in the winter,” he reveals. “It’s a story that happens during one day in a snowstorm. I have the most beautiful cast; I have Sofia Carson, Brian Tyree Henry, Elisabeth Moss — people that I had worked with and that I have a connection to, people who are supporting me in this thing and believe in me as a director.”
Even though that seems like a pretty extensive set of plans, Moura’s only looking just to the horizon, not beyond. “I used to make long plans when I was younger,” he admits. “Now, this is already a lot.” And honestly, I don’t blame him for thinking that. Laying out his career has kept me busy enough, and I’m just sitting at a desk. There’s a couple other projects we didn’t have time to discuss — notably The Last Day, the film he’s co-starring in with Vikander — and it seems like he’s going to be busy well into the future even though he jokes that, as he gets older, “if I don’t have eight hours of sleep, the next day I’m totally fucked.” But if moving one step at a time is what keeps him on our screens for a while longer? I’ll take it.
Season 1 of Dope Thief is now streaming on Apple TV+.
Photography: Yellowbelly | Grooming: Alexandru Szabo | Styling: Marcella | Clothing: Edward Sexton, Crockett & Jones, APAR | Location: London | Hair: Alexandru Szabo at Carol Hayes Management | Fashion Director: Marcella Martinelli at Carol Hayes Management

Dope Thief

Release Date

March 13, 2025

Network

Apple TV+