Golden Globes 2026: Wagner Moura wins ‘Best Actor – Drama’
At the 83rd annual Golden Globes, Wagner Moura has taken home the award for ‘Best Actor – Drama’ for his portrayal of technology professor Marcelo in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent.
In the neo-noir political thriller, Moura must flee Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1977.
He returns to Recife to seek his son, but the move comes at a high cost, as he becomes entangled in a web of assassins, corruption, and state-sponsored violence.
The Secret Agent was highly praised among critics and even appeared on Barack Obama’s highly anticipated list of favourite movies from 2025.
The other contenders in the ‘Best Actor – Drama’ category included: Oscar Isaac, for Frankenstein; Michael B Jordan, for Sinners; Joel Edgerton, for Train Dreams; Dwayne Johnson, for The Smashing Machine; and Jeremy Allen White, for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.
While accepting the award, Moura, the first Brazilian performer to win in the category, shared with the crowd at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles, “The Secret Agent is a film about memory – the lack of memory – and generational trauma. If trauma can be passed along generations, values can too.”
In 2025, at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards, Adrien Brody won the Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Drama’ for his role in The Brutalist, with Moura’s win setting a new milestone for Brazilian cinema.
Talking to W Magazine, Moura explained: “I love movies, and I love politics. Politics is what put [director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s] and I together. We met 20 years ago in Cannes. I was obsessed with working with him, but it never worked out. Then, in Brazil from 2018 to 2022, it was a bad moment in terms of the government.”
Concluding, “Kleber and I were very vocal against what was going on, and we both suffered the consequences. We talked about how we could show the perplexity that we were experiencing. It took us two, three years to make the film happen.”
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