Actor Wagner Moura is currently considered to be an Oscar front-runner for his extraordinary performance as a researcher whose life is upended by the Brazilian dictatorship of the late 1970s in Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s “The Secret Agent.” Moura’s accolades are well deserved, but the true greatness of “The Secret Agent” lies in the fact that every single role of the sprawling ensemble is as impeccably cast and vividly drawn as Moura’s Marcelo — something that was a priority for both Filho and casting director Gabriel Domingues.
“We spent a long time discussing the characters,” Domingues told IndieWire. “Kleber had very long descriptions for each of them, filled with details, even if the character only made a short appearance or had a few scenes. In one way, it makes my job easier because the clear directions provide a guideline. The challenge is that you have to find people who precisely match what Kleber has written, which made most of the roles extremely difficult to cast.”
The fact that “The Secret Agent” was a period film put further pressure on Domingues to find people who matched what Filho had in mind. “He wanted to create a universe that was very faithful to the atmosphere and energy of the 1970s,” Domingues said. “That meant finding certain faces that looked like they might have existed in 1978.”
When looking for actors to round out the ensemble supporting Moura — the people who would play everyone from hit men and government officials to maids, academics, and revolutionaries — Domingues was careful to consider how those faces could convey not only emotion and psychology but class. “In the 1970s, Brazil had even more social inequality than we do now,” he said. “The economic disparity was even worse. So it was important to find people who looked like the specific types of people who would be working in each job at that time.”
The pool of actors from which Domingues could choose was narrowed slightly by other considerations that knocked them out of the running for period roles. “When you’re doing a period drama, there are certain physical aspects that make actors feel more contemporary, and it makes it harder to bring them onto the movie,” he said. “Certain skin treatments and tattoos were matters for discussion. You want to avoid those in a movie like this.”
Domingues found himself asking exactly what it was that made an actor look like they belonged in Filho’s vision of 1970s Brazil, and often he found that it was something in the eyes — as in the case of an actor cast as a teenager whose parents don’t accept him. “That guy had a sadness in his eyes that was different from all the other actors we met,” Domingues said. “There was a melancholy that somehow reminded us of the 1970s. He also had a simplicity that felt right for a character who Kleber had noted came from the countryside, that he was new to the city.”
One of the trickier roles for Domingues to cast was that of a hit man pursuing Marcelo. “Kleber wanted this guy to look like a famous serial killer from the 1970s,” Domingues said. “There was a documentary on him, so we used that as a reference for his face. He had cold, psychopathic eyes, and it was very difficult to find the actor with that look, though we did eventually find an amazing actor who was terrifying.”
Although Wagner Moura is a major star in Brazil, many of the supporting roles in “The Secret Agent” were cast with less experienced actors and even people who had never appeared in a movie before. The key role of a transcriptionist who pieces together Marcelo’s story in the present day, for example, went to an actor who simply wowed Domingues and Filho with her audition.
“We did many auditions for that part,” Domingues said, noting that after looking at Laura Lufési’s self-tape he brought her in for an in-person session. “We shared two or three scenes with her, and tried to give her the space to ask questions and understand the text. We tried to make her as comfortable as possible, and it worked — she was very moving performing a long monologue. When we gave her the part, she was very excited to learn she would be in a movie with Wagner Moura.”
Moura’s notoriety in Brazil meant that Domingues had to think about people who would be able to measure up to him on screen, whether or not they had a lot of credits on their resume. “We had big movie stars in ‘The Secret Agent’ and we had people on their first jobs,” Domingues said. “The main criteria we had, aside from that they had to be good actors, was that they had to be nice people to work with. You want people with good souls, who can feed the energy of the movie. That’s one of the complexities of casting.”