Fernanda Torres Has Already Won

Fernanda Torres, the very down-to-earth diva of the Brazilian screen, emerges on the terrace of a midcentury modern mansion in Beverly Hills. It’s a crisp and sunny Saturday morning in February. Wrapped in a black overcoat, Torres gazes at an awe-inspiring view of Los Angeles. 

She is fresh off a sojourn in Lisbon. Her last memories of the city are from January, when she surprised oddsmakers and herself by winning the Golden Globe for her work in I’m Still Here, a first for a Brazilian actress.

“It was so beautiful when I was walking to the stage,” recalls Torres, 59, of beating some of the most famous women on the planet. “Kate Winslet was applauding me and smiling. I don’t know her, so I found that very moving. Tilda Swinton, Nicole Kidman — they were smiling, too. 

“Then L.A. was on fire,” she says.

Her Hollywood dream cut short by an ecological nightmare, Torres barely had enough time to toss her Golden Globe into her purse in her frantic escape from the apocalyptic inferno. The statuette drew a raised eyebrow from a TSA agent at LAX. (He did not confiscate it.) 

“This tragedy in L.A. — the city of cinema — is very strange,” she says, evoking the mournful intonations of her real-life character in I’m Still Here: Eunice Paiva, a bourgeois housewife whose life is overturned by her husband’s disappearance at the hands of Brazil’s military dictatorship that lasted through the 1970s and ’80s. “I think I’ll celebrate after the Oscars, the whole thing. There’s just been no time,” she adds.

Ah yes, the Oscars. In the few weeks since the fires, Torres learned that she has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. The nomination is one of three for I’m Still Here, which is also up for best picture and international film.

The honors cap an already triumphant run for a film that’s still rolling out around the globe. Since its November debut in Brazil — it opened stateside in January via its distributor, Sony Pictures Classics — I’m Still Here, from 68-year-old Brazilian director Walter Salles, has earned blockbuster status by art house standards. It cost just $1.5 million to make and has already grossed $25 million worldwide.

“It’s in its 12th week [in Brazil] and is number one, again,” marvels Salles in a phone conversation from L.A. “That rarely happens. It’s so beautiful to see that the sensibility of one country can resonate in another.” Beautiful, yes, but also foreboding, as I’m Still Here has resonated in Brazil, the U.S. and other areas of the world partly because of its timely message about the dangers of encroaching fascism. 

More than just a box office hit, however, I’m Still Here has served as something akin to a mass therapy breakthrough for the country of over 200 million, where the film has boldly confronted unresolved traumas as it has broken post-pandemic records. 

“We never talked about it,” says Torres of the country’s decades of dictatorship, during which thousands were tortured and hundreds vanished completely. “This is very Brazilian. You sweep everything under the carpet.”

Torres, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, has not been to Brazil since the Oscar nominations were announced on Jan. 23. She was last there over the holidays, when Fernanda-mania was already at a fever pitch. Now there’s nothing more to do but wait until March 2 to see if, like at the Globes, she can pull it off once more. The 3 million likes of a photo of Torres posted to the Academy’s Instagram account suggest just how fervently the country anticipates the results.Torres’ fans in Brazil are a passionate bunch, approaching this race like they might approach a world championship soccer game.

Just ask fellow nominee Karla Sofía Gascón, star of Netflix’s Emilia Pérez, who complained of their online bullying before her own racist tweets derailed her campaign. One theory going around town posits that Gascón’s scandals were unearthed by those fans, who combed through years of her Spanish-language social media posts.

Whatever happens, Oscar night will all but certainly play out like the World Cup on the streets of Rio. “They fall in the middle of Carnival, so everyone will be out celebrating — but all will stop for the ceremony,” says author Marcelo Rubens Paiva, 65, whose 2015 memoir of the same name serves as the source material for I’m Still Here. “It will be like the moon landing.”

Torres is the second Brazilian to be nominated for an acting Oscar. The first was her mother — 95-year-old Fernanda Montenegro, perhaps the only actor more legendary than her daughter in the South American country. Montenegro was nominated for 1998’s Central Station, also directed by Salles. Gwyneth Paltrow won — which remains a thorn in the side of the collective consciousness.

Montenegro also appears in I’m Still Here, playing an older version of Eunice, whose resilience is rattled later in life by Alzheimer’s. (The title refers to an admonishment the real Eunice once gave her children, who had been speaking of her in the past tense. She died in 2018 at age 89.)

“People are very excited,” says Torres. “I could feel it in Portugal, too. They come up to me in the streets and are very moved.” She takes the tidal wave of sudden attention in stride: “I’m kind of used to it, because all my life I lived with my mother. My life won’t change that much.”

A few days later, I ask Montenegro to describe the pride she feels over her daughter’s journey with I’m Still Here. 

“There is a miracle in my life,” Montenegro replies. “Living almost 100 years and seeing my daughter fulfill herself as a human being and a creative artist. Fernanda is a Renaissance soul.”

“Any Oscars advice?”

“She has already won — before, during and after,” Montenegro says. “Being nominated is the Oscar itself.”

***

Torres’ childhood was very much like the life depicted in I’m Still Here — an open house in Rio de Janeiro filled nightly with writers and actors discussing politics and creating art. 

“All the artists moved to Rio in the ’50s and ’60s,” she explains. “I would come home from school, and they were rehearsing around the dinner table. I liked very much to stay around.”

The Paiva family was well known in that community. The patriarch, Rubens Paiva, played by Selton Mello in the film, was a former congressman who returned to civilian life after a 1964 coup d’etat installed a totalitarian regime. 

But Paiva secretly supported the resistance and was thrown into a detention facility in 1971, never to be seen or heard from again. The film follows his wife, Eunice, who is also incarcerated in a dark and dingy prison cell for several weeks before she is released without explanation and left to fend for the family’s five children. 

Rather than letting the disappearance destroy her, she moves the family to Sao Paulo, attends law school and becomes a crusader for Indigenous rights. All the while, she pursues justice for her husband until she can definitively lay his memory to rest. 

It may be a story filled with tragedy, but, as Torres sees it, it’s far from a tragic story. “By saying goodbye to the utopian life, she becomes herself,” she says of Eunice. “Because she was not entirely herself in the beginning of the movie. She was a mother, a housewife, the ‘great woman behind the great man.’ But after the tragedy is when Eunice becomes Eunice.”

Salles’ family was close with the Paivas. He was a boy of 13 at the time of Rubens’ arrest and remained lifelong friends with Marcelo, the youngest of the family’s five children (played affectingly by young Guilherme Silveira in the movie). 

At 20, Marcelo had a devastating swimming accident that left him gravely injured. Like his mother, he turned his tragedy into triumph, penning a memoir in 1982, Feliz Ano Velho (Happy Old Year), that became a runaway best-seller and anointed him the voice of his generation. But it was not until the 2015 release of a second memoir, I’m Still Here, which documented Eunice’s accomplishments for the first time, that Salles realized she would make an ideal protagonist for a film.

“Marcelo was like an idol in my adolescence,” explains Torres. “We knew that he had lost his father. We knew Rubens was tortured and killed by the dictatorship. But it took 50 years for Marcelo to write this book where he discovers that the hero was not his father or him, it was Eunice Paiva. She was interested in justice, education, the right things. Fame, she didn’t need. It’s a great guide for the present.”

When Salles sent the script to Torres, she assumed he only wanted her notes — not that he wanted her to play Eunice. That’s because Torres is frequently associated in Brazil with her work on two long-running TV sitcoms, having played a man-hungry bridal shop employee in Tapas & Beijos (Slaps & Kisses) and half of a contemporary couple in Os Normais (Normal People).

But Salles had directed Torres twice before and knew of her dexterity in drama. Once she realized the part was hers for the taking, “it took a few hours for her to say yes,” he adds.

Torres prepared for the role the way a boxer might train for a fight. Realizing Eunice as written was some of the most challenging but beautifully rendered material she’d ever encountered, she found the best acting coach in Brazil — Helena Varvaki, a Greek woman steeped in ancient tragedies and Stanislavski, plus a psychiatrist, to boot — and fully immersed herself in the most demanding role of her career. 

“She would work in memories,” Torres recalls. “She would say, ‘Today I want you to lay down and listen — because I think Eunice spends a lot of time in prison listening.’ Things I imagined that day were still with me when we filmed the prison scenes.” 

At the end of each session, Torres wrote a letter in character as Eunice to her husband or one of her children. “She really built a reservoir of memories for me,” Torres adds of Varvaki. 

To choreograph the family scenes, another coach named Amanda Gabriel was brought in to work with the five children who had been cast, some of whom had never acted before. “In the beginning, I could not remember everyone’s names,” says Torres, who raised two sons with her husband, the director Andrucha Waddington. “But at the end, it was like they were my children.”

In the end, Torres’ exhaustive devotion to detail proved effective in ways that surprised even her. After filming a key scene at an ice cream shop — she learns of her husband’s death just moments before — she found herself weeping on a Rio street. “That doesn’t happen to me normally,” she says. “But I felt Eunice’s presence. It was nothing spiritual. The character was just there with me.”

Says Salles, “She embraced all those tasks with such a desire to get to where she should get as an actress. After a certain moment, I was unable to dissociate Eunice from Fernanda. Very few actresses could have pulled it off.”

***

With all the preparation in the world, however, one could not have anticipated just how potently I’m Still Here’s anti-authoritarian message would resonate in 2025. 

In the several years it took Salles to research the era and write the screenplay, Brazil took a hard turn to the right, electing Jair Bolsonaro — a Donald Trump-like populist who openly sympathized with the old military regime — as president. Had Bolsonaro won re-election in 2022, Salles says, none of the exterior scenes in I’m Still Here would have been authorized for filming.

Only months ago, it came to light that Bolsonaro was planning a coup that would have reinstated him in office. “We were unaware of that — but maybe Marcelo predicted it. Art is an act of anticipation, after all — or should be,” Salles says.

But Trump’s steamrolling first weeks in office — including his recent dismissal of the Kennedy Center board and installation of himself as chairman — collided with the film’s U.S. debut. It all stirs up echoes of a period Torres remembers all too well, an era in which the political climate had seismic effects on the arts. 

She still vividly recalls the time her parents, then rising theater producers, were detained for questioning at a torture center. The police recorded the interrogation and played it back to them.

“They said to my mother, ‘Why did you laugh when he said this?’” Torres recalls. “And she was frozen. My father said, ‘You are mistaken. That’s not her laugh.’ He convinced them and they let her go.

“People were killed,” she continues. “A bomb exploded in a stadium. And my mother received death threats in the theater. There was a call saying if she went onstage, she would be killed.”

Torres is part of a lineage of women like her mother and Eunice — the unwavering matriarchs of Brazilian culture, both pushing the country forward while carefully preserving its past. 

“The word I find for Eunice is ‘civility,’” she says. “She’s a civilized human being. And she was living in an uncivilized moment of history.

“So she had to be three times more civilized.”