AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in Edinburgh, Scotland, with Nermeen Shaikh in New York.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show with the acclaimed Brazilian actor and filmmaker Wagner Moura. At the Edinburgh International Festival, he’s starring in a sequel to a play by Henrik Ibsen titled A Trial — after An Enemy of the People. In Ibsen’s groundbreaking 1882 play An Enemy of the People, protagonist Thomas Stockmann faces shame and exile after attempting to expose a water pollution scandal in his hometown. In the sequel, director Christiane Jatahy throws Stockmann into a modern-day public courtroom in Brazil, and it’s up to a jury of audience members to decide if he is innocent or whether he is indeed an enemy of the people. Wagner Moura plays Thomas Stockmann in the sequel.

His Oscar-nominated performance in the film The Secret Agent, set during the Brazilian dictatorship, won him a Golden Globe, as well as the 2025 Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor. Wagner Moura is also widely known for his role as the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series Narcos.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now in Edinburgh by Wagner Moura.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. You’re a lot thinner than you were as Pablo Escobar.

WAGNER MOURA: Oh, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: But last night, your performance, Wagner, in A Trial — after [An] Enemy of the People, the takeoff on Ibsen’s play, if you can explain this play? It is prevalent in so much of your work that you’ve starred in, that you’ve directed. Explain what this was all about. You took the breath away of the, what, 600 people at the Lyceum.

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, Amy, I was so happy to see you there yesterday. I’m such a fan. Everybody was like, “Amy’s here!” It was such a electrifying moment in the backstage.

This play is like I — I always wanted to stage this play, Ibsen’s play. But then I started talking with Christiane Jatahy, who’s the director of the play, and she didn’t wanted to do the play the way the play was. She was more interested in the aftermath of those characters, what was going to happen to — especially to Thomas Stockmann after he was declared an enemy of the people.

AMY GOODMAN: And for people who aren’t familiar, especially young people — 

WAGNER MOURA: Yes, OK.

AMY GOODMAN: — the theme of Ibsen’s play?

WAGNER MOURA: So, yeah, An Enemy of the People was a play written by Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen back in the 19th century, and it’s about a doctor of this spa resort. And this doctor discovers that in this, a place that everybody lives from this spa resort — the spa resort is the most important resource of the city. But then he discovers, this doctor discovers, that the water of the spa resort is contaminated and harmful to people’s health, so he reports that to the mayor of the town, who is his brother. And the mayor decides that he’s going to hide the information from everybody else, because he’s afraid that the tourists won’t bring the money that they bring to the city every summer if they know that the water is contaminated. So, this is the dilemma of the play. Should — and because Thomas insists, his moral imperative is, like, “I have to tell the truth,” and he suffers lots of consequences for doing that.

And then we bring — so, in our production, we bring the audience to the stage every day, and together we decide whether Thomas Stockmann, in today’s perspective, in 2026, whether Thomas Stockmann is or is not an enemy of the people.

AMY GOODMAN: An enemy of the people. And I think of Bolsonaro, who is currently in prison, the former president of your country, Brazil, and the parallels dealing with COVID-19, what you should tell the people. And you bring up COVID in this new version of the play. But your observations, as you were born halfway through the dictatorship in Brazil? You were born, what, in 1976.

WAGNER MOURA: In ’76, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Something you know well. And now a president who was admiring of that dictatorship — 

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro, is in prison —

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — for doing something that President Trump — you now live in Los Angeles — also was involved with —

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — as he attempted to overthrow the government in —

WAGNER MOURA: The election, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — the election and stop it.

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, I —

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think he’s in prison?

WAGNER MOURA: I think that — you know, I have a theory. I’m not, you know, a political theorist, but my theory is that — because the same thing that happened in the U.S., the invasion of the Capitol, happened in Brazil. It was the same thing, people invading the institutions and breaking things and all that. And that’s because of their leaders. They were like — Bolsonaro and Trump were like, “You should do that.” The reason that in Brazil we acted really quickly to put Bolsonaro in jail, to find the financiers, everybody —

AMY GOODMAN: He was called the “Trump of the Tropics.”

WAGNER MOURA: Yes, he was called the “Trump of the Tropics” first. But the reason that I think that Brazil did it so fast is that — not because I think that Brazilians’ institutions are stronger than Americans’, but I think that we in Brazil, we know what a dictatorship is. We know how harmful that is, how horrible that is, how bad that is. That’s my — that’s my only explanation for the difference between them, because they were both election deniers. They both attempted against democracy. And Bolsonaro himself, he is in jail right now because it was found — it was found, a plot of a coup d’état, where he really — there was — it’s written that he — the idea was to kill Lula and the Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. So, that’s basically why he is in jail right now.

But I think when you mention COVID, I think he should be in jail for that, too, because he was responsible for many deaths during the pandemic in Brazil.

AMY GOODMAN: Because?

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, denying the pandemic, asking — saying people should go to the streets, work, “This is just a flu. Don’t worry about it,” and didn’t buy the vaccines on time. You know, that was — I mean, that’s something that we mention in the play a little bit.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Wagner — 

AMY GOODMAN: My colleague Nermeen has a question for you from New York.

WAGNER MOURA: Hi.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Wagner, just to — hi, Wagner. Just to turn to some of the work, your recent work, which has, in fact, focused on the dictatorship in Brazil and Jair Bolsonaro, when you accepted the 2025 award for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, you actually thanked Bolsonaro, saying that without him, the film could not be made. And you’ve also talked about the extent to which, despite the fact that the dictatorship ended more than four decades ago, echoes of the dictatorship remain, and had it not been for the dictatorship, Bolsonaro may not have been elected at all. So, if you could just elaborate on some of these questions?

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, we had in Brazil — well, we had this dictatorship that took a long time, 20 years, from '64 to ’85. And after the dictatorship, we had this thing called the Amnesty Law. The Amnesty Law was basically something that forgave. You know, let's start from zero. Let’s not think about it anymore. Let’s have a fresh moment. And then, it basically forgave all the torturers, killers and people that did despicable things to civilians after — during the dictatorship.

And I think that was one of the worst things that could have happened in Brazil, because now, talking about the play again, I think that the notion of truth, the truth is a very important historical landmark. If we erase the truth, we leave people, like, not really knowing, you know. So, was the dictatorship that bad? If everybody was — you know, if that was OK, then why we should care about democracy, and why should we?

And I think that Bolsonaro emerged in Brazil as a political force because of that Amnesty Law, because if we didn’t do — if we hadn’t done that, people like him would never have appeared, like, a man who showed up as a far-right figure, that in the beginning was kind of funny, but then he became like the president of Brazil. He dedicated — when Dilma Rousseff was impeached in that coup d’état against her, he dedicated his vote to the men who tortured Dilma. And I think that these kind of things would never have happened if we had — if we hadn’t had this Amnesty Law, that maybe make people forget how horrible the dictatorship is.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Wagner, if you could say —

WAGNER MOURA: That’s why I think it’s important to keep doing films, to keep doing, you know, political issues at the work of the university, historians, journalists.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, could you say, Wagner, exactly how was the dictatorship talked about after it concluded? You know, you also made that magnificent, your first film as a director, Marighella, which looks at, really very closely, the way in which dissidents were treated under the dictatorship. But it’s also implied in the film that their opposition is not referred to as opposition, but as terrorism, and indeed that that might be what’s taught also in schools. So, how, socially, have Brazilians, politically, through education, been informed of the — of what happened during the dictatorship, yeah, now?

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, when I was a kid, when I went to school, in the books that I read, was like — they didn’t even say — there were semantic changes. They didn’t even say “the coup d’état of ’64.” They would say “the revolution of ’64 that saved Brazil of communism.” That was the kind of stuff that I studied when I was a kid.

That’s why, coming back again to the play and to — it was like this play, the reason that I decided to do this play was, like, to investigate the moment of truth nowadays. What is truth? Because I believe that the truth as we know it is over, especially now with the advance of technologies and the decline of journalism as a pillar of democracy. So, but that’s been going on forever. Like, so, when I was a boy, that was the kind of thing that I was reading at school. That’s why I think that my interest in movements of resistance in Brazil is so strong, because we don’t know much about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to talk about movements of resistance. We’re going to do this in Part 2 of our discussion. Right now we have to end the broadcast. Wagner Moura, the acclaimed Brazilian actor and filmmaker, nominated for an Oscar for his performance in The Secret Agent, we’ll talk about that and post it online at democracynow.org. We’re here in Edinburgh, where he’s starring in the film A Trial — after An Enemy of the People.

That does it for our show. A very happy birthday to Anjali Kamat, and special thanks to professor Adam Dixon and staff here at Panmure House. I’ll be speaking at King’s Theatre Tuesday — check our website — and in London on Wednesday. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.