Wagner Moura's moment is now. He wants to bring all of Brazil with him

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The stakes are high for the characters that Brazilian actor Wagner Moura takes on.Caught in the grip of challenging sociopolitical backdrops, his magnetic and brooding men — whether bold authority figures, conflicted everyday guys, notorious outlaws or those in positions of power — represent an affront to the status quo.And so does he.“Regarding injustice, I’m usually explosive and that reflects in the kind of characters that I play,” Moura tells me sitting at Neon’s offices on a rainy Los Angeles afternoon in November.

“There’s this energy and this will to break s— down in a lot of them.”Moura has just arrived back in L.A., where he spends most of his time with his three children and wife, photographer Sandra Delgado, after concluding a run of “A Trial – After An Enemy of the People” on stage in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador.The play is a modern-day update to Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” conceived by Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy.His theater engagement overlapped with the fall festivals he attended to present “The Secret Agent,” a Brazilian thriller set in the city of Recife during the 1970s, when the country was under a military dictatorship.In the genre-bending period knockout from Kleber Mendonça Filho — one of Brazil’s leading filmmakers — Moura plays Armando, a grieving widower on the run who joins a community of people hiding from their pasts in trying times.

Under a new name, he works toward finding an escape for him and his young son, but the powerful bigot he stood up against in his former life as a scientist is getting closer to finding him.A simple man must become a stealth operative in order to survive.“I love that this is not a film about someone who’s trying to overthrow the government — he’s just a guy who sticks with his values, with who he is,” Moura says about his part.

His salt-and-pepper ...