{"id":6625,"date":"2016-09-06T10:41:56","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T14:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/"},"modified":"2016-10-06T17:34:43","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T21:34:43","slug":"narcos-wagner-moura","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/","title":{"rendered":"Wagner Moura"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"6-Wagner-Moura\"<\/a>At the height of his infamous career, Pablo Escobar controlled the cocaine trade in the U.S. and, according to Forbes, was one of the ten richest men in the world. More than two decades since his death he continues to inspire books, movies and TV series, among them Netflix\u2019s critically acclaimed Narcos<\/em>. From Gaumont Television, the drama, now in its second season, stars Brazilian actor Wagner Moura as the Colombian drug lord, chronicling his epic rise and fall and telling the stories of the DEA agents tasked with bringing him down. Narcos<\/em> marked the first international TV production for Moura, who has been well known to Brazilian audiences for years thanks to shows like Tropical Paradise<\/em> and feature films such as Elite Squad<\/em>. He tells TV Drama<\/em> about his approach to embodying Escobar.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> How did you first hear about the prospect of playing Pablo Escobar in Narcos<\/em>?
\nMOURA:<\/strong> It came from my friend Jos\u00e9 Padilha, who is the director of the show. He asked me what I thought about playing Escobar. He hadn\u2019t spoken with Netflix when he invited me to do it. I said, I\u2019d love to. Right after I spoke with him I flew to Medell\u00edn, because I felt I had to be there. The show was supposed to be in English at the time, but even so, I thought I had to go to Colombia and learn Spanish. So that\u2019s how it began. I actually didn\u2019t know much about Pablo Escobar. I remember very clearly the image of him dead on a rooftop when he was killed. And I remember seeing the bombings in Bogot\u00e1 on TV and the war between the Cali and Medell\u00edn [cartels]. So I went to Medell\u00edn and studied Spanish and lived in the city where Pablo grew up. It was a very intense experience. I spent two years living in Colombia. I gained 40 pounds [for the role]. It was an important period of my life.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> How did you go about trying to understand who he was and what his motivations were?
\nMOURA:<\/strong> Everybody in Colombia knows someone who knows someone who knew Pablo or wrote a book about him. There are a lot of books about Escobar. Books by journalists\u2014very accurate biographies\u2014and by people who knew him, which are fun to read because they give a more intimate [perspective]. I honestly think I read everything written about Pablo Escobar and modern Colombian history. But I did all of that in order to then forget it and create my own version of Pablo. I think at the end of the day that\u2019s what actors do. It\u2019s the way you connect your emotions and feelings with a character. I didn\u2019t try to imitate him or walk like him or talk like him. You can watch a lot of footage of Pablo Escobar on YouTube, but I decided I had to create my own Pablo. And that\u2019s what I did.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> How did you approach dealing with the nuances of his personality? He could demonstrate brutality in one moment and then be a devout and caring husband and father.
\nMOURA:<\/strong> He was a very complex person, and that\u2019s great for any actor. Pablo wasn\u2019t like the other drug dealers from the \u201980s or even from today. Pablo wanted more. He wasn\u2019t happy just being the seventh richest man in the world according to Forbes <\/em>magazine. He wanted to be loved. He wanted to be accepted. He wanted to break this barrier that exists in South American countries between the elite, the few that have a lot of money, and the majority of the population. Pablo wanted to be the president of Colombia. That says a lot about him. He was a great character\u2014and he really existed. And what I tried to do\u2014and this was a big concern not only for me but for everyone on the show\u2014was be as respectful as possible with the history of Colombia and as accurate as we could with what happened there in the \u201980s.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Tell me about your relationship with Jos\u00e9 Padilha.
\nMOURA:<\/strong> We are very good friends. I did his first film, Elite Squad<\/em>, which is an important film for me as well. And then we did the sequel, Elite Squad 2<\/em>, which made the biggest box-office [revenues] in Brazilian history. They are both very political films, about how the police act in Brazil. We both like politics and we both like films, and we get along very well together. I wasn\u2019t the obvious choice to play Escobar. I was skinny, I didn\u2019t speak Spanish; he could have easily chosen a Colombian actor to do it. But for him, I think it was important to have someone he could trust, who could understand how he worked, who could support him on set. It is a great relationship. I\u2019m going to direct my first film now, in Brazil, and Padilha is my biggest influence. It\u2019s also a political film, about a Brazilian guerrilla who fought against the dictatorship in the \u201960s and \u201970s.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Narcos<\/em> is frequently held up as the model for what an international drama can be today\u2014it\u2019s made by the U.S. arm of a French studio for a global streaming platform with a diverse set of talent on- and off-screen. It\u2019s in both English and Spanish. Did that make the atmosphere on set different from any of your previous work?
\nMOURA:<\/strong> This for me was the greatest thing of all. Brazil is very isolated in Latin America because we speak Portuguese, so we don\u2019t have a relationship with the rest of the countries [in the region], which is crazy because we have the same issues, we are neighbors, we are culturally similar. Brazil consumes its own culture. So for me, working with actors from Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, it was like a dream. For the first time I felt that I was a part of something other than just being Brazilian. I was Latin American and we were talking about something that resonated a lot with all of us, which is the drug trade. Narco-trafficking is a big reality in our countries, the countries that produce and export drugs. That\u2019s where the war on drugs is taking place: Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia.<\/p>\n

There is this other thing you mentioned, which is Netflix and the way Netflix is making original content globally. A film like Beasts of No Nation<\/em>, for example, which is about African kids in an African country going to war, it connects with me because I\u2019m a human being. That\u2019s what connects all of us. Netflix is [leading] a great revolution. It\u2019s cultural globalization. It\u2019s great that American audiences are watching shows with subtitles like Narcos<\/em>. It\u2019s something Americans aren\u2019t used to. Netflix is producing original content in other countries. They\u2019re doing something in Brazil in Portuguese. They did something in Mexico in Spanish. It\u2019s so important that someone in Germany can watch something spoken in Portuguese about Brazilian life. [TV shows like this] can become global in a way that cinema never allowed. Unless you go to a film festival, it\u2019s difficult to watch in a theater a film that is from another country and in another language.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Tell me about season two. Pablo is in a very different place now, essentially running for his life.
\nMOURA:<\/strong> We\u2019re going to see Pablo in a way that we haven\u2019t seen him before. It\u2019s about a man losing his power, money, allies, sicarios<\/em>, almost losing his family as well. So it\u2019s a different Pablo actually. The difference between season one and two is season one is more epic in the sense that it covered 15 years of Pablo\u2019s life. So it\u2019s a season that tries to explain to people how the drug trade works and how the DEA got involved and how the cartels operate. The second season is more dramatic. It\u2019s about the drama of the characters. It\u2019s about what this guy, the biggest capo in the world, is going to do when he\u2019s being hunted by everybody. Also, the DEA characters Pe\u00f1a and Murphy [played by Pedro Pascal and Boyd Holbrook, respectively] go through very tough moral conflicts as well. In order to catch Escobar they start to become something like him. Narcos<\/em> is not a regular cop show with the American good guys who go to South American countries to kill the bad guys. It\u2019s more complex than that.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Now you\u2019re directing your first film. Do you have any other projects on the slate that you can tell us about?
\nMOURA:<\/strong> After Pablo, I have to spend a year [not acting]. I\u2019m happy I\u2019m going to direct a film. I feel that anything I\u2019d do in the next year or so would be contaminated by Pablo Escobar or the way I played Pablo. First thing was I had to lose weight, so from the 40 pounds I gained to play him I\u2019ve already lost 30 or so. I have to spend some time just doing other things. [Narcos<\/em>] was a very intense experience for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brazilian actor, who plays Pablo Escobar in the hit Netflix series, talks about his approach to embodying the Colombian drug lord.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":6626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[658,1278],"class_list":["post-6625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","tag-narcos","tag-wagner-moura","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nWagner Moura - TVDRAMA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wagner Moura - TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Brazilian actor, who plays Pablo Escobar in the hit Netflix series, talks about his approach to embodying the Colombian drug lord.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-09-06T14:41:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-10-06T21:34:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2015\/09\/2016-09-06-WagnerMoura-Narcos-2016.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/\",\"name\":\"Wagner Moura - TVDRAMA\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2016-09-06T14:41:56+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-10-06T21:34:43+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/narcos-wagner-moura\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Wagner Moura\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\",\"name\":\"TVDRAMA\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\",\"name\":\"Mansha Daswani\",\"description\":\"Mansha Daswani is the editor-in-chief and associate publisher of World Screen. 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