Actor Wagner Moura is at the moment thought-about to be an Oscar front-runner for his extraordinary efficiency as a researcher whose life is upended by the Brazilian dictatorship of the late Seventies in Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s “The Secret Agent.” Moura’s accolades are effectively deserved, however the true greatness of “The Secret Agent” lies in the truth that each single position of the sprawling ensemble is as impeccably forged and vividly drawn as Moura’s Marcelo — one thing that was a precedence for each Filho and casting director Gabriel Domingues.
“We spent a very long time discussing the characters,” Domingues instructed IndieWire. “Kleber had very lengthy descriptions for every of them, full of particulars, even when the character solely made a brief look or had a number of scenes. In a technique, it makes my job simpler as a result of the clear instructions present a suggestion. The problem is that you must discover individuals who exactly match what Kleber has written, which made a lot of the roles extraordinarily tough to forged.”
The truth that “The Secret Agent” was a interval movie put additional strain on Domingues to search out individuals who matched what Filho had in thoughts. “He needed to create a universe that was very trustworthy to the ambiance and power of the Seventies,” Domingues mentioned. “That meant discovering sure faces that appeared like they could have existed in 1978.”
When in search of actors to spherical out the ensemble supporting Moura — the individuals who would play everybody from hit males and authorities officers to maids, lecturers, and revolutionaries — Domingues was cautious to think about how these faces may convey not solely emotion and psychology however class. “Within the Seventies, Brazil had much more social inequality than we do now,” he mentioned. “The financial disparity was even worse. So it was vital to search out individuals who appeared like the precise sorts of people that could be working in every job at the moment.”
The pool of actors from which Domingues may select was narrowed barely by different concerns that knocked them out of the working for interval roles. “Once you’re doing a interval drama, there are specific bodily features that make actors really feel extra modern, and it makes it more durable to deliver them onto the film,” he mentioned. “Sure pores and skin therapies and tattoos have been issues for dialogue. You need to keep away from these in a film like this.”
Domingues discovered himself asking precisely what it was that made an actor appear to be they belonged in Filho’s imaginative and prescient of Seventies Brazil, and infrequently he discovered that it was one thing within the eyes — as within the case of an actor forged as a teen whose mother and father don’t settle for him. “That man had a unhappiness in his eyes that was totally different from all the opposite actors we met,” Domingues mentioned. “There was a melancholy that one way or the other reminded us of the Seventies. He additionally had a simplicity that felt proper for a personality who Kleber had famous got here from the countryside, that he was new to town.”
One of many trickier roles for Domingues to forged was that of successful man pursuing Marcelo. “Kleber needed this man to appear to be a well-known serial killer from the Seventies,” Domingues mentioned. “There was a documentary on him, so we used that as a reference for his face. He had chilly, psychopathic eyes, and it was very tough to search out the actor with that look, although we did ultimately discover an incredible actor who was terrifying.”
Though Wagner Moura is a serious star in Brazil, most of the supporting roles in “The Secret Agent” have been forged with much less skilled actors and even individuals who had by no means appeared in a film earlier than. The important thing position of a transcriptionist who items collectively Marcelo’s story within the current day, for instance, went to an actor who merely wowed Domingues and Filho along with her audition.
“We did many auditions for that half,” Domingues mentioned, noting that after taking a look at Laura Lufési’s self-tape he introduced her in for an in-person session. “We shared two or three scenes along with her, and tried to provide her the area to ask questions and perceive the textual content. We tried to make her as comfy as potential, and it labored — she was very shifting performing an extended monologue. After we gave her the half, she was very excited to be taught she could be in a film with Wagner Moura.”
Moura’s notoriety in Brazil meant that Domingues had to consider individuals who would be capable of measure as much as him on display screen, whether or not or not they’d a variety of credit on their resume. “We had massive film stars in ‘The Secret Agent’ and we had folks on their first jobs,” Domingues mentioned. “The primary standards we had, apart from that they needed to be good actors, was that they needed to be good folks to work with. You need folks with good souls, who can feed the power of the film. That’s one of many complexities of casting.”
