Actor Wagner Moura Speaks On The New Netflix Original Film, "Sergio"

Charismatic and complex, Sérgio Vieira de Mello (Wagner Moura) has spent the majority of his storied career as a top UN diplomat. But just as he readies himself for a simpler life with the woman he loves (Ana de Armas), Sergio takes one last assignment. The assignment is meant to be brief -- until a bomb blast sets into motion a gripping life-or-death struggle. Inspired by a true story, "Sergio" is a sweeping drama focused on a man pushed to his limits.

Video transcript

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RICKY CAMILLERI: Hi, folks. Welcome back to "BUILD" at Home. I'm your host Ricky Camilleri coming to you from my home in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And I am talking to the great Wagner Moura in his home in Los Angeles. He's here to talk about his new film, "Sergio" about the UN Diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, which is coming to Netflix quite soon.

Wagner, before we get into it, I just want to say, as we do at the top of all these interviews, that over 700 million school lunches have gone missing for children across the country due to school closures because of the coronavirus. If you would like to find out how you can help get these kids the meals that they need, please go to nokidhungry.org where you can find out how to volunteer, how to donate. It's nokidhungry.org.

WAGNER MOURA: I'll definitely do that, Ricky.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Thanks, Wagner. It's for the audience. But that's great that you're going to go too, great. [LAUGHS]

WAGNER MOURA: [LAUGHS] I'll do that. I'll do that for sure. This has been-- first of all, thanks for having me here. And then this has been the biggest challenge, I think, of all these crises-- what-- actually, when all this began. I started to-- my first weeks were like, very-- I was working in Mexico. And I came to LA, came back home.

And my first weeks were really good. I felt-- you know, I was with my kids at home. And then my-- and that in these first weeks were the weeks that I really realized what kind of crisis is this? You know, this is-- and especially when I heard the connection that I have with Brazil and the news that I receive from a country that's more vulnerable like many others in me the kind of in with that lunatic as a president.

It's a crisis that we will affect really, really strongly the most vulnerable people in the world. And this is what really my-- my-- we are privileged people to-- we can stay at home. We can work from home. We can-- it's-- so this is a very-- the things that I've been trying to do is exactly like to try to participate and to enjoy and to engage as much as I can in things like this one that you just mentioned.

RICKY CAMILLERI: I have to ask, as a person from Brazil, how much can you actually take of what your president says on a daily basis or on a weekly basis about the virus, because as an American right now with our maniac in the White House, I have a hard time taking the daily onslaught of misinformation that is being peppered into our brains.

WAGNER MOURA: It is even worse, Ricky, because Trump-- the institutions in the US are strong enough to hold any-- you know, it's difficult to have a president like Donald Trump, I think. But it's the institutions in the US are very strong. So he can't do whatever he wants.

It's in Brazil, our democracy is kind of young. We were under a very havoc dictatorship from '64 to '85. So there are things that are easier to someone, like Bolsonaro to do. So it's-- yeah, it's bad.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Yeah. Speaking of institutions, "Sergio," your new film, which is coming to Netflix is, as I said at the top of this, about a UN diplomat who rose ranks as a diplomat for 34 years. He, unfortunately, passed away in a bombing in Baghdad in 2003, the bombing of the UN Embassy. What made you want to take on the role of Sergio? What drew your interest to this?

WAGNER MOURA: I was always very fascinated by the UN since I was a kid. I thought that the United Nations was-- and with everything. I mean, how weak the UN can be and how vulnerable the UN is. For example, when our film is pretty much based on when in the aftermath of the invasion of when the US invaded Iraq. And the UN was openly against the invasion. And Sergio himself was personally against it. And he actually denied going there four times.

But they had to be there. So all these contradictions of the UN always fascinated me. I mean, an organization, which is ultimately a human rights organization that has to operate under, you know, very pragmatic circumstances or dates, like you see like, nowadays like, today, yesterday, Trump blocking the financial aid to the--

RICKY CAMILLERI: To WHO.

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, to WHO. And so it's a-- this dynamic always interested me. And Sergio was someone, who in the end of his life, like, when he was in Iraq, that contradiction was very exposed in the way he was dealing with the-- the way he didn't want, as you could see in the film, the UN to be people to think that the UN was there in Iraq to help the coalition.

And so I think that the film is full of these contradictions. And, of course, in a moment like this to have the example of a world leader, like Sergio, because he was supposed to be the next secretary-general after Kofi Annan. To have someone like him as a template of how a world leaders should behave in a moment of crisis or it's and in considering that this crisis is exposing how weak our most of the world leaders now day.

I think it's interesting. Of course, we didn't plan to release this film now. But it's-- but our film is always an interaction of what some-- an artist wanted to say with this specific particular audience that receives the film in a particular time frame in history.

So this-- it's a the fact that we are releasing this film now, it says something about, you know, values-- high values, I think, which in the end of the day-- at the end of the day, this is what I think it's lacking. Whatever says you did was led by a lot of-- by high very elevated values.

RICKY CAMILLERI: And we see-- and as you said, though, like he is a practical leader in a way. His values sometimes are in conflict with the practical leadership that he has to abide by. And I loved the sequence or the reoccurring sequence because it's told in flashbacks of him in East Timor where he is dealing with the leader of-- the sort of I think he's in a rebel faction in East Timor that like, obviously, like other members of the United Nations don't want him dealing with. Possibly other leaders in the world don't want him dealing with.

But he sees it as the only clear pathway forward for any kind of like, peaceful end to-- I think-- is there-- there's like, a civil war happening there. Excuse me, I'm not-- there's a gorgeous history-- The only clear end to violence and suffering and like, destitute poverty is by in some way aligning himself with these leaders. That's an incredible example of what you're talking about.

WAGNER MOURA: Someone said that his biography would be-- would be called War Criminals, my friends, because Sergio was-- yeah, he met-- he was the first UN person to have a meeting with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. And, yeah, he was very pragmatic.

He was a very prag-- he saw, even-- he was when he died, he was a high commissioner-- the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. And he saw human rights itself with a very pragmatic point of view. He used to be an idealistic when he was part of the movements in '68 in Paris and the riots and everything.

But with time, which I think it's something that might happen to most of us when you get older, we become a little more pragmatic. He became very pragmatic. And he was, you know, considered one of the greatest negotiators at the UN. But at the same time, the values, like I said, were always there.

If I had to summarize what this film is about, I would say this film is about empathy, you know, which was the biggest quality that Sergio had-- the capacity of looking at people as people. He could look at George Bush and at the janitor of his office with the same kind of interest.

He was interested. And then he could see people as people, not as numbers or statistics. I think this is a very important thing. And I think that this is lacking strongly nowadays in our daily lives and, of course, in the lives of the ones who are leading countries and--

RICKY CAMILLERI: Yeah, they seem to be far more aligned with ideology than they are with a humanistic side. Speaking of Sergio's humanist side, the scene where in East Timor where you are-- when you meet with a woman that Ana de Armas introduces you to for her mic-- in her microlending shop, it is such a beautiful moment, so well written. And your performance is incredible.

Can you talk about just shooting that scene, and what that phrase meant to you, because I never been to East Timor. I've never worked in microlending. But that phrase meant so much to me. It's a universal feeling, I think.

WAGNER MOURA: Isn't that amazing? I love this. It's-- that-- that-- I love that scene. It's great that you brought that up, because one of the greatest things in this film for me was the-- first of all, I'm very interested in producing. I was one of the producers of this film. And I'm very interested in producing films that, especially, I mean, me being a Latin man to make films about-- Latinos are people from all over the world that don't reinforce stereotypes.

And I-- so I think that this film about a UN man, which with actors from all over the world and shot in different countries and with-- so in that particular day, we brought all these people that you saw in that village. They are from East Timor. We brought them from East Timor. We shot it in Thailand. But we brought all of them from East Timor. And they are, of course, very familiar.

And to who Sergio was, many of them knew Sergio. And Sergio's a very important person in the history of that country. And so with that scene, specifically, we chose that actress. That was the most difficult cast I think we had in the film, because she's not an actress. She's a teacher in East Timor.

And what she says there is something that a woman really sad to Sergio in Bosnia. And but it's such a-- it's such a crazy line and such elaborated at way of thinking that we were a little concerned if that would be something that would go naturally in someone's mouth. And then when she said that, we didn't rehearse that scene.

When she did it, it came from-- it came from a very personal point of view, because she had lost many people from her family in the Independence War in East Timor. And so what you see there, it's I'm not acting. I'm not like-- I'm just watching her saying those things.

And what she said really, really moved me as a person, because I could see that that was coming from-- she was saying those lines which were lines. But it was coming from a very deep place of her experience as a human being.

So, yeah. I loved that scene. I love the fact that she's from East Timor that most of the extras in that scene are Timoreses. And we also did that in the scenes after the bombing where Ana's character is looking for Sergio in the rubble. Most of those extras there are from Iraq. So there was a lot of reality and truth in what was going on there.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Was there a part of you that took on other-- you said that you had an interest in the UN. But this feels like the absolute opposite from Pablo Escobar in a way in the sense that this man is athletic. He works out. He's not gluttonous, and he's not a killer. He's a-- he's a humanist. Was that part of the choice? Was that part of the reason that you wanted to take on the role of Sergio?

WAGNER MOURA: No, no. I-- like, I said, I'm very interested in-- I mean, "Narcos" was a very important thing for me in many different ways. I mean, it was important for my career. I mean, started to pay attention in what I was doing. But also, personally, it was very important for me to understand what the drug trade-- how it began.

You know, it effects a lot South America and countries that produce and export drugs. So to understand how it began and to have a clear vision of how absurd the war on drugs thing is-- how that it's only a way to-- to exercise social control over this people in poor neighborhoods.

So it was very important for me in many different ways, as a Brazilian man, you know, speaking Spanish in a-- different-- it was a lot of-- so it was very important for me. But having said that, I think that the way Latinos are represented in Hollywood in films in the US, ours too, it's a still very-- first of all, we are very subrepresented.

We are-- the amount of characters in Latinos in the American films doesn't represent the amount of what we have of-- what we really are in the American Society. And also, I think the way the characters are shown is a stereotype. It's always like the violent dude or the criminals and/or the sexy Latina. And I think that it's up to us also to kind of try to change that-- that perception.

So Sergio was kind of more like, for me like, a first step in a sort of ambitions and political idea of trying to make films about, not necessarily characters based on real people, but characters that are in different roles, you know, in different positions that could be more like, understood of what American society really is.

I remember when I saw Diego Luna on that "Star Wars" film, being the lead man in that film "Rogue One" and speaking with his Mexican accent. I was very happy. And I felt very-- you know, I felt representative. I felt that we could be-- Latinos can be also the main guys, because we are an important part of the society.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Yeah, representation is so-- as much as we talk about it, it's so often taken for granted, especially by people like me who have been represented very simply in America their whole life. It's like, I can stand by. And I can say more representation needs be happened. But I will never know what it's like to be underrepresented minority in this country and to not see myself on screen. I can't imagine what that feels like.

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, I think it's important for especially for new generations and kids that could-- can you imagine like a Mexican or a American kid that from, you know, Mexican parents that when they saw Diego playing "Star Wars" with-- I think that's a very important thing. So, yeah, so I think that Sergio was sort of part of this little thing that I think that I could-- that I'm committed in doing.

You know, I think it's-- and Sergio is a very-- yeah, and he was-- he's not that known in Brazil, for example. I think he was a very important-- as a Brazilian, I wanted people to know who that guy was.

RICKY CAMILLERI: He's not that-- but he's Brazilian. How come-- how come he isn't very well known in Brazil?

WAGNER MOURA: He's not. I mean, it's-- I don't know, it's-- the UN or the-- it's not-- diplomats are not the most popular--

RICKY CAMILLERI: Yeah, right. It's not that-- [LAUGHS] not as popular as they should be. I will say that.

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, they should. Exactly, yeah. Definitely more popular, I think.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Talk a little bit about your supporting cast here, Ana de Armas, who-- I say supporting. But actually, I mean, she's on screen almost as much as-- as much as you are. How did you come about-- come about casting her?

WAGNER MOURA: She-- one of the actors of the film is a German actor called Clemens Schick who is a very good friend of mine-- had worked with Ana before. And one of our producers, [INAUDIBLE] was also-- he was always saying Ana should play this character. I have to say I wasn't familiar with that. I didn't know who Ana was. I hadn't seen the "Blade Runner" film.

And but, of course, I met her. And I had a-- an instant immediate connection with her. She's a very grounded woman. She's Cuban. And, of course, the fact that we were the Latinos in the film, I think that we had the very-- we could-- there was something that we could share culturally. And so we'd had a very good connection with her.

And then while we were doing a film, I realized that she is an amazing actress. She's really good actress. And so I think that she's great in the film. And I think that we couldn't be happier. And she's having a great moment right now in her career after "Knives Out." And she's going to play Marilyn Monroe in the film.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Yeah, Andrew Dominik film.

WAGNER MOURA: Exactly. So talking about representation. How cool is a Cuban-- a Cuban actress playing the most important icon of American filmmaking. So it was great. It was-- we're really glad to have on in the film.

RICKY CAMILLERI: You know, there's another cast member of in a very small part of the movie who I love. I've seen him in things over the years. It's Garrett Dillahunt. And he shows up for like a very smart part in the movie. But he's so great. How did that--

WAGNER MOURA: He's so great. He's so great. I mean, we're so happy with the cast. We have Bradley Whitford. It's--

RICKY CAMILLERI: Oh, that's right, yeah.

WAGNER MOURA: Brían, Garret-- And I mean, as we were shooting in this different locations-- we were all of us together in Thailand and Jordan and some of us were in Brazil-- we really had time to hang out together and it was-- I couldn't be happier about how cool these people are and how great actors they are.

I was very, very blessed to be working with them. Garret is amazing. And we were doing this-- the scenes that I have with him were the most difficult scenes for me in the film, which are the scenes in the rubble when when, you know, Sergio was basically dying. So those were difficult scenes. And it was amazing to have Will and Garrett and Brian in there with me.

RICKY CAMILLERI: How did you guys stage the rubble-- the aftermath of the bombing? Because it's incredible looking. And it's not shot very small close-ups or anything, it really looks like you had a wide space to create that set.

WAGNER MOURA: It isn't-- we did it in a studio in Bangkok. And so yes, it wasn't like in the real location so we could-- but even though it wasn't comfortable at all, we were-- Brían and I we were like in that very, very bad position. It was hot in there. The whole crew had to be confined in that little space. It wasn't easy at all. Those were the most difficult scenes I think of the film.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Before I let you go, Wagner, I kind of touched on this, but what would you like audiences to take away from "Sergio" considering it's about a humanist diplomat and we're watching it in the midst of this moment?

WAGNER MOURA: Yes I think that, especially considering the moment we are living now, I think it's interesting to compare Sergio with the leaders that we have nowadays and so we can realize what are the qualities that we want leaders to have. And when I see Sergio and when I see how he behaved as a world leader, as a negotiator I'm like this is the kind of--

In the end of the day, I think, again, this is a film about empathy, which I think it's the most important quality a world leader should have. And I think for sure the world is going to change completely after this. I personally think that it's obvious a strong crisis of capitalism itself. I don't know what this is going to be-- how this is going to be after the crisis.

I've been reading interesting news. I read something about Amsterdam now and how the mayor of Amsterdam is starting to think about new policies of including people, of respecting labor laws, or environmental laws. And so things that I think that will make capitalism more humanistic in a way.

But for sure-- I don't know in which direction, but for sure we are going to grow through a post-capitalism. And I think that the direction I would like the world to go is like something I see a lot in someone like Sergio Vieira de Mello. Humanistic point of view, to get closer, to see people as people, to have a more empathetic look over other people.

RICKY CAMILLERI: You would hope that we're going to go through some sort of post-capitalist, at least, thought process for a little while following this. One could at least hope as an American.

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah. Yeah, it's not going to be fast, but I think this is going to change.

RICKY CAMILLERI: It's been such a pleasure to talking to you. Congratulations again on "Sergio." When can audiences see it? When is it hitting Netflix?

WAGNER MOURA: It's Friday now-- it's Friday, April 17th.

RICKY CAMILLERI: This Friday?

WAGNER MOURA: Yeah, this Friday.

RICKY CAMILLERI: For tomorrow, audiences check out Wagner Moura in--

WAGNER MOURA: Tomorrow.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Tomorrow. Or I guess maybe later to-- 3 o'clock in the morning tonight. Something along those lines. It will be there when you wake up in the morning. Thanks so much for talking to me and please stay healthy. Stay safe.

WAGNER MOURA: Likewise, Ricky. It was great to talk to you, man. Take care.

RICKY CAMILLERI: Take care.

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