Fernanda Torres on Her Surprise Golden Globe Win, ‘I’m Still Here,’ and the Nepo Baby Debate: It’s ‘the Wrong Fight’
When Fernanda Torres won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama for the superb political drama “I’m Still Here,” the event became like a holiday in her home country, Brazil. President Lula tweeted congratulations. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo da Costa Paes, offered to welcome Torres home on a firetruck from the airport. The long-working actress and writer, and daughter of Brazilian film royalty Fernanda Montenegro, could become only the second Brazilian performer Oscar-nominated for acting, after her mother received a nod in 1999 for “Central Station,” another film from “I’m Still Here” director Walter Salles.
When IndieWire spoke with Torres just two days after her unexpected Globes coup over higher-profile (in the West, at least) actors like Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”), Angelina Jolie (“Maria”), Tilda Swinton (“The Room Next Door”), Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”), and Kate Winslet (“Lee”), she was looking at a week of Q&As in Los Angeles and an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” All have since been canceled in the wake of the ongoing fires in L.A. But with the sizable Brazilian contingent in the Academy and love for Torres in Latin America and overseas, she still has a shot at Best Actress for her moving performance as the real-life Eunice Paiva. A lawyer in Brazil who died in 2018, Eunice was the mother and activist who, in the 1970s, stood up to Brazilian military dictatorship amid the government-forced disappearance of her politically dissident husband, Rubens.
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“I was totally the dark horse, the only Portuguese-speaking actress in a foreign movie. It was beautiful,” Torres said of her Golden Globe win. “Right before, Tilda [Swinton] came to our table because Tilda had been meeting with [‘I’m Still Here’ distributor] Sony Pictures [Classics], which also released [Pedro] Almodóvar’s movie. We had this conversation about this crazy circus that is this kind of campaign. She was so happy with my award. I was walking to the stage to see Kate Winslet, so very pleased, and Nicole. Everybody was happy with the dark horse because of something good, even for the industry, that this kind of movie can have this attention, with a foreign actress speaking another language. It’s such a [positive] sign for the industry.”
Torres said that, back in Brazil, the fanfare was wild for viewers watching the show at home. “There was noise in the street, people flashing the windows, screaming in their apartments, like the World Cup. The mayor called me talking about a firetruck to receive me at the airport.” (And was her Globe win that shocking, anyway? The revamped post-HFPA Globes membership has an impressive Brazilian lineup.)
Torres, who turned 59 last year, said it was good to have the experience of winning the Globe now, “because I feel mature, to not go on stage and have this ‘oh my god’ speech, to be able to receive it in a calm way. I’m glad that it happened to me at an age and a time of my experience where I don’t feel like Cinderella. I’m able to go on stage and receive it in a very noble way, that I didn’t lose my mind, crying and thinking that my life will change because of it. I don’t think so.”
Back at home, anyway, Torres has a cabinet of honors: not only a runner-up prize from the L.A. Film Critics Association for “I’m Still Here,” but a 1986 Cannes Best Actress win for the erotic psychodrama “Love Me Forever or Never,” plus plenty of Brazilian prizes.
She’s long acted in the spotlight — in Brazilian films and on two of the country’s wildly popular sitcoms, “Os Normais” (2001 to 2003) and “Tapas e Beijos” (2011 to 2015) — under her mother’s shadow, to a degree. And in the case of “I’m Still Here,” the 95-year-old Montenegro plays an older Eunice, rattled by Azlheimer’s disease in the film’s last scene but upon seeing a newscast about Rubens Paiva’s case, recognizes who she was in the ’70s. A woman who stood up to extremism, played with calibrated emotional control by Torres, in a performance that involves no screaming or crying but instead a quiet resistance.
“It really opened a new world for me for acting, the power of restraining, of allowing the audience to feel and not to have the acting vanity of showing,” Torres said. “It’s almost like, ‘Do not act.’ And that’s the mystery of this movie, I think. Because as we [the actors] don’t respond, the audience fills it and wants to respond in your place.”
Salles’ Venice-winning film, from a script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, adapts a famous memoir by Eunice’s son, the Brazilian icon Marcelo Rubens Paiva, focused on his mother. Marcelo is still alive, and an enormously celebrated writer of Brazilian scripts, plays, and novels.
“At the age of 20, he had an accident, a very silly accident and lost movement from the neck down,” Torres said. “Once they asked Marcelo, ‘What was the day that changed your life?’ Everybody expected him to say, ‘It was the day I had the accident,’ and he said it was the day this publisher came to him and said, ‘Why don’t you write this story?’ When he was recovering at the age of 20, he wrote this book and he became an idol to all my generation and became a friend of mine. I know Marcelo very well.”
Torres never had the chance to meet Eunice. “Nobody knew about her really, and she never wanted to be known, which is very rare nowadays, where everybody is selling themselves in selfies and the internet. It’s a woman [who] was only interested in real life and not selling herself, so he had to write this book from Brazil to discover Eunice.” After being captured, Eunice was tortured and imprisoned for nearly two weeks, the whole time not knowing where her teenage daughter was or if she was still alive. Torres plays those scenes with profound understatement, the most harrowing in the film.
Torres starred for Salles in his films “Foreign Land” and “Midnight” in the 1990s. They kept in touch, but she was still surprised after her rising success on television and as a novelist (her book “The End” came out in 2014) that he wanted her to play Eunice given her Brazilian celebrity as a comedy actor.
After years of sitcom work in series whose popularity in Brazil she likened to “Seinfeld” and “Friends” here, Torres thought, “Walter would never work with me again. When he called me, I thought he was going to invite me to write something for him because that’s what I thought would be possible. Then, he [offered me] Eunice, and I said, ‘Are you sure?'”
Torres has vivid memories growing up with her mother, Montenegro, and her father, Fernando Torres, who was also an actor (“Kiss of the Spider Woman” on screen). “My mother feels pity for people who have never experienced the feeling of being onstage. She thinks that acting is the ultimate thing you can do in life, something that changed her life for sure,” Torres said. “She didn’t push me [to be an actor], and she didn’t forbid me, but I could feel how much pleasure she had onstage. I think she had more pleasure onstage than being at home with us. She loved being at home with us, but I could see she had a kind of pleasure onstage. I was raised in the wings of theater.”
So, of course, I had to ask her whether the concept of “nepo babies” — the children of icons whose success is publicly deemed to be indebted to their parents — translates in Brazil. Of course it does.
“We just inherit whatever you invent. We just inherit it,” she said of the American notion. “You are very good in America to sell your things to other countries … and I’m now the nepo baby person that proved that a nepo baby is worth living!” She laughed. “You don’t have to kill a nepo baby as soon as he is born. I really hate this idea because this is ancient, that people learn in their environment. The dining table of my house was the place where my parents were rehearsing. It doesn’t mean when you are nepo baby that your life is solved. On the contrary, you have to invent yourself. You have other issues.”
In our discussion, Torres grew more passionate about the American-headline-driven discourse that blew up in 2022 when New York Magazine published what it deemed the definitive guide to all the nepo babies in Hollywood: actors and artists borne from their rich, decorated parents’ orbit despite possibly questionable talent and maybe undeserved prominence of their own. “It’s one of those things that’s the wrong fight,” she said of the debate. “The good fight is to fight for good education for everybody. Inequality is not based on the chances that a nepo baby can have. You can kill all the nepo babies in the world, and you won’t solve the inequality problem. Taxing big fortunes is a way of fighting against inequality. Fighting for health for everybody, for education for everybody.”
She added that in the process of that debate, “You kill something that is beautiful, that is people who inherit something that learned something. This comes from the cave age. It’s good that you learn something from your parents. So it’s just the wrong fight. But, of course, it gives great headlines.” (Including inevitably my own, which she acknowledged with a laugh.)
“It gives people space to point fingers at each other pretending that they are fighting against inequality, and they are just killing something beautiful that is a circus family, for instance. I come from a circus family. So I am proof that nepo babies have a chance! [laughs] They should have a chance in the world. Don’t kill the nepo babies! Nowadays, we are full of wrong fights. We’re full of noisy fights that don’t lead us to anything. The fight against inequality, the fight for taxing great fortunes, the fight for regulating the digital world, those are the good fights. Come on people, wake up.”
“I’m Still Here” is in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. The 82nd Golden Globe Awards were held Sunday, January 6 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. They aired on CBS and streamed via Paramount+. Dick Clark Productions, which owns and produces the Golden Globes, is a Penske Media company. PMC is also IndieWire’s parent company.
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