Oscars 2026: Wagner Moura becomes first Brazilian ‘Best Actor’ nominee
Wagner Moura has become the first Brazilian actor to be nominated in the ‘Best Actor’ category at the Oscars.
In the neo-noir political thriller, Moura plays the technology professor Marcelo, who 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.
Nominations for the coveted ‘Best Actor in a Leading Role’ will be fought out between Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet, One Battle After Another’s Leonardo DiCaprio, Blue Moon’s Ethan Hawke, and Michael B Jordan for Sinners.
Moura is also the sixth Latino to be nominated in the best actor category after José Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Edward James Olmos, Demián Bichir and Colman Domingo. Only Ferrer took the Oscar home, for 1950’s Cyrano de Bergerac.
Only two other Brazilians have been nominated for acting over the Academy’s 98-year history. The first came in 1992 for Fernanda Montenegro’s role in Central Station. Her daughter, Fernanda Torres, also gained a nomination for the emotional 2024 picture I’m Still Here.
While accepting the Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Drama’ for this very role, Moura shared in his acceptance speech, “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.”
The Secret Agent was highly praised among critics and even appeared on Barack Obama’s highly anticipated list of favourite movies from 2025.
Moura had previously explained how the film took him a few years of hard work to come to fruition: “It took two, three years to make the film happen.”
He added, “In Brazil from 2018 to 2022, it was a bad moment in terms of the government [… Director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s] 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.”
The Oscars will take place on March 15th. Watch the official trailer for The Secret Agent below.
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