As Fernanda Torres strode to the Golden Globe stage last month in a black Olivier Theyskens gown, she had history on her mind. Not only had she just become the first Brazilian to win best actress in a drama at that ceremony (in a major upset over fellow nominees Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet, and Tilda Swinton), but Torres’s mother, Fernanda Montenegro, had also been nominated in the same category in 1999 for the tender drama Central Station.
She dedicated the award to Montenegro, a titan of Brazilian stage and screen, now 95. “She was here 25 years ago, and this is proof that art can endure through life, even in difficult moments,” Torres said onstage. “This is a film that helps us to think how to survive in tough times.”
In the harrowing true story I’m Still Here, Torres plays Eunice Paiva, who oversees a happy, music-filled beachfront home buzzing with five children in Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s military dictatorship. One day in 1971, her husband, Rubens, a civil engineer and former congressman, is taken by the army, and she’s tasked with steering her family onward while assiduously attempting to track him down. Based on a 2015 memoir by the Paivas’ son, the film hews closely to Eunice’s perspective to create a stirring impression of resilience in a time of terror that feels uncomfortably resonant at the moment. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year before its US release last month.
Walter Salles (On the Road, The Motorcycle Diaries) helmed the film and also directed Montenegro in Central Station—and he cast Torres in one of his earliest films, 1995’s Foreign Land. Montenegro also appears in I’m Still Here as the senior version of Eunice. “Our whole history was in this film,” Torres told Vogue last week from New York. “It was like Foreign Land finally meeting Central Station. It all made sense.”
Her surprise Golden Globe triumph buoyed Torres’s awards-season momentum, and like her mother before her, she found herself a best-actress Oscar nominee weeks later. Many also credit the buzz Torres’s win generated as a major reason I’m Still Here landed among the 10 films up for the best-picture Oscar, in addition to being nominated for best international feature. Torres faces formidable performances by Cynthia Erivo (Wicked), Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez), Mikey Madison (Anora), and Demi Moore (The Substance), but several Oscar pundits believe Torres could emerge victorious on March 2.
It has, however, been an unprecedented mess of an Oscar season, laden with scandals and outrage, both amplified by social media. And Torres hasn’t emerged unscathed: Days after the Oscar nominations were announced, fellow nominee Gascón walked back comments that appeared to accuse Torres’s team of undermining Gascón’s work. (Both actors have maintained nothing but praise for one another’s performances.) The same week, Torres issued an apology for a Brazilian TV comedy skit, resurfaced from 2008, in which she appeared in blackface.
Born in Rio to two actors, Torres, 59, began acting as a teenager and, at 20, won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for the 1986 marital drama Love Me Forever or Never. Over the next four decades, she’d go on to work across cinema, theater, literature, and television, earning the nickname the Nicole Kidman of Brazil.
Speaking with a pronounced passion that’s worlds away from her powerfully restrained performance in I’m Still Here, Torres discussed why she believes hardship helped Eunice become her true self, what she learned from her mother’s Oscar campaign, and how this awards season’s many controversies have affected her. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: What drew you to I’m Still Here?
Fernanda Torres: I read the script first as a friend of Walter’s. I was not his first pick, so I told him it was a beautiful script, and I was in awe of what they chose to include. I read the book when it came out, and it’s so sprawling that it could be a four-season series. But I never thought he would ask me to do it. I’d been doing a lot of TV comedy, so I thought I was lost to Walter. [Laughs.] And I’m older than Eunice was; she’s 41 when it starts. But he invited me to do it, and we managed.
Viewers can connect to this story in many ways. How did you connect to Eunice or her story?
That house felt like mine, and that period was my childhood. She reminded me a lot of my mother at that age. But now I’m a mother, too, so that feeling was very powerful. Everybody who watches this film tells us a personal story: They know someone with Alzheimer’s or were raised in a family with a lot of kids or lost someone. Everybody can relate to this film or to one of the characters. That scene in the beginning, with the car of teenagers who are pulled over and questioned by the military at gunpoint—that was my adolescence. I knew that with all my heart.
As the title suggests, the film is about surviving a terrible moment. How do you think Eunice managed to keep going, and not only that, but have this whole other life as a human-rights lawyer?
She did more than keep going—she became herself after the tragedy. She was a woman who was raised to be this perfect housewife, the great woman behind the great man. At the beginning of the movie, she’s making coffee, preparing dinner, putting the children to bed, but as soon as Rubens disappears, she starts to articulate herself and adapt in the space she has. When the police come to take him away, the first thing she does is offer them dinner, as if saying, “I’m allowing you to be in my house. You are not invading.” Then when she discovers Rubens is really gone, she buries the utopia during the scene in the ice cream parlor. And she decides never to tell her children what’s happened, which is so contradictory, but it’s unbearable to tell five children this horrible thing. I think she wanted to keep their innocence. There is cowardice, but it’s also a decision to allow them to smile. That’s when she decides that she will not play the victim and let the dictatorship win.
Later, this woman goes to law school. She always said she understood that what happened to her family was no different from what happened every day with minorities in the suburbs of Brazil. She fought for Indigenous reserves and consulted with those who wrote Brazil’s constitution in 1988. She was a woman ahead of her time, and she became herself when her family’s father figure died.
Was there a particular detail in your research that you found helpful to unlock her as a character?
Her interviews. I watched them over and over. She had this mix of great femininity—much more than I have—with politeness, intelligence, and persuasion. And she was always smiling, with restrained emotions. She fought for civility in a country that had lost its civility.
How was this role different from the many others you’ve done in your career?
I had never done a tragedy. For me, she’s a Greek figure like Hecuba or Penelope—someone who faces something beyond our comprehension. The challenge was to try to achieve her level of dignity and to not betray her with cheap melodrama. The restraint was new: As an actor you always try to overdo, to show how well you can cry and scream. But I had someone very real. I stayed with her under my skin for almost a year. At a certain point she became like second nature. This was the closest I got in my life to truly being someone else. I never felt so deeply that I could access a character. It rarely happens in cinema, but when it does, it’s magical for an actor. We stop thinking—it’s just play.
You’ve been traveling around the world with the film for months. What are some surprising reactions you’ve encountered?
The first surprise was that the film became a blockbuster in Brazil. I never thought it would happen because it’s a heavy drama. But in screenings, people cried and talked to each other after the movie. I thought it would be a cult movie but never a blockbuster. The second surprise was to see people in other countries relating to it in the same way. It’s a film that has no frontier. That’s because it’s about a family and what it means to live in a moment of fear.
What do people outside of Brazil need to know about the country to understand this movie in a deeper way?
That the dictatorships of South America were not a banana republic matter. They were part of the macro politics of the time. That’s why I always repeat that she’s a victim of the Cold War; she’s not a victim of the dictatorship of a banana republic country. People treat the dictatorships in South America like something that happened on that faraway continent. But it’s all part of the same story.
Did your mother give you any advice about Oscar campaigning, having done this herself 26 years ago?
It’s different now because it’s much more global. Academy voters are everywhere. When she did it, they were mainly American. I saw what happened with her: She was kidnapped for months in a sense. She always said, “I thought I was doing this little Brazilian movie, and suddenly I was in the middle of a hurricane.”
Much has been written about the many controversies this awards season. How have these swirls of controversies affected you?
I have been working so much on the film’s campaign, it’s superhuman. I travel for seven hours here, five hours there, 20 hours, doing screenings and Q&As. The film never had money for big billboards; it was a man-to-man, guerilla fight. And outside of Brazil, it hadn’t been released before January, so people only heard about it from festivals or special screenings. And then there was the surprise of the Golden Globes, but we didn’t even have time to celebrate because LA was on fire the next day and I had to evacuate. In the middle of that tragedy, you receive something wonderful, but you move on—there is no time.
It’s a new way, with the violence and power of the internet. Brazil is very, very strong in the internet. Artists in Brazil had to learn to navigate this wild thing over the last 10 years. Artists were targets of fake news, of aggressiveness. At the same time, the internet is wonderful for an independent artist like me, as it allows me to release my plays and books.
I’m in shock with what happened. It’s sad, it’s really shocking. But I’m totally against the hate culture on the internet. I was a target, and I always fought against it.
What do you plan to do after the Oscars?
Sleep. [Laughs.] I wrote a six-part series that we are in deals with, and I wrote a script for a film. I have my life as it always was. I don’t know if it’s gonna be different. I don’t think so.
You’ve had such a rich career. Is there anything you still want to do that you haven’t done?
There’s a short story by [José Maria de] Eça de Queirós, a Portuguese writer from the 19th century, that’s a Darwinist version of Genesis. I would love to do it in theater. It’s been a long project, and things keep happening, but I need to do it. It’s unbelievable, one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.
