But Armando, played with cagey vulnerability by Wagner Moura, who is up  for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the Oscars, doesn’t read as a man accustomed to subterfuge. He’s no political dissident or intrepid freedom fighter, much less the elusive secret agent of the film’s title. Instead, he has simply crossed the wrong man and become a hapless victim of corruption, impunity, and greed—problems still common in contemporary Brazil. As Mendonça Filho told the Brazilian news magazine Veja in 2023, The Secret Agent, then still being made, “is not a dictatorship film: It’s about the logic of Brazil.”