Fernanda Torres on the ‘terrifying’ size of Oscar campaigns, learning to restrain her emotions for I’m Still Here, and more

Interview by Gerrad Hall
Illustration by Natalia Agatte

If you don’t already know who Fernanda Torres is, you will now.

The actress and author, 59, is a big star in her native Brazil — a country that has put an enormous amount of support behind her performance in Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, catapulting them not just onto the international stage but into the Oscars spotlight.

The movie centers on the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman in Brazil, disappears at the hands of the country’s military dictatorship in the early 1970s. Eunice is imprisoned and tortured (as is one of her daughters, but Eunice — and the audience — don’t know for how long at first) as interrogators try to get information out of her — information that she legitimately doesn’t have. Once released, Eunice dedicates her life to learning the truth about her husband’s fate and becoming a human rights advocate and attorney — all the while still raising her five children.

Her work earned her a Golden Globe Award in January, an achievement made all the more personal by the fact that her mother, celebrated actress Fernanda Montenegro, was a Golden Globe and Oscar nominee 25 years ago for Walter Salles’ Central Station.

Below, she chats with The Awardist about her mother’s reaction to her recent accolades, Montenegro’s performance as an older Eunice Paive in I’m Still Here, the “long marathon” that is the road to the Oscars, how she’s navigated the “old-fashioned campaign” for the movie, whether she was nervous to portray such an important figure in Brazil’s history, filming those interrogation scenes, and more.

THE AWARDIST: I know you grew up in Brazil, but how familiar were you with Eunice and her family?

FERNANDA TORRES: We knew what had happened with this family, but we didn’t know the details. You had the headlines that the dictatorship had killed and tortured one of the members, and that the body has never been returned, and that this woman has been left alone with five children, but we didn’t have the [details]. Then in the ’80s, the youngest son became a very famous writer because he lost the movements of his body in a very silly accident. And what was amazing was that this beautiful boy lost his movements and he wrote this book about his recovery that was so alive, so incredible — there was no self-pity, nothing close to that, that we all fell in with Marcelo. I knew Eunice first as the widow of Rubens and then as the mother of Marcelo, but we didn’t have any idea of this woman. She never wanted to be recognized for anything. And then [several] years ago, Marcelo wrote the book, I’m Still Here, where he tells the whole story about the disappearance of Rubens, his father, in the ’70s and also in his adulthood, how he discovered that the great heroine of the family, was his mother. She went back to university at the age of 46 after becoming a widow with five children, and she became this great human rights lawyer, and she participated in the Constitution of Brazil, the new one that brought democracy back to Brazil. She defended indigenous rights; she is responsible for indigenous reserves in Brazil — the forest is still there because of her. So it’s an immense human being. And then as she had Alzheimer’s, Marcelo thought that her memory would be erased… and at the same time that the country was losing its memory about the dictatorship. So it’s the story of a family, but it’s also the story of a country, and it’s also the story of the world because I think they were victims not of a dictatorship that happened in Brazil but of the Cold War. The Cold War sponsored all the dictatorships in South America. So it’s also the story of all of us.

Once you came to know all of that about her and then Walter Salles, the producers, whoever it might’ve been, come to you with this role, were you thrilled at the chance to play her or intimidated?

I felt the responsibility to do a movie and to do work that would be faithful to her because, you see, she’s a woman that refused to be portrayed as a victim. So me and Walter, we talked with each other about not making a melodrama out of this story. It’s a tragic story, but it’s not sad. She was able to raise those five children, and they endured. Sometimes I think that even the book and the film now, with this great success and recognition, is still a job of Eunice even after death. [She’s a] very civilized woman in a very uncivilized moment of history who pursued justice knowing that even if it would take four decades, she would win at the end. So the film, I think, is part of this resistance because this is very important in her — she was never a victim in the public square. She used her smile and her civility as a weapon. She’s a great guide for nowadays.

You mentioned the four decades, 40 years later, her story finally being told, and I think there is something to say about the timing of when stories like this finally make their way to all of us, because there is something, unfortunately, to be learned right now from her story and all of the things that she fought for.

Totally. Actually, I think it’s five decades now. The Cold War was a very dystopic time, and a time of fear. I remember I was afraid of the Red Button; as a child, I hought the world was going to come to an end. And again, now, for other reasons — and also because of the Red Button — we are afraid. We are all afraid. And when you are afraid, you look for populist governments because they give you the impression that we have simple solutions to heavy, complicated problems. So again, we are living in dystopic times. And what she teaches us, I think, is that it’s going to take a long time that you have to fight with civility for justice, for education, but you have to have joy in life. And I think that’s what she teaches her son. Now, after doing her, I finally understood why Marcelo, even paralyzed from the neck down, was able to still be him. She is a very powerful woman and a very great guide for nowadays because it’s going to take a long time, fellows.

We’ll circle back to your performance, but I have to mention how the last couple months have just been an absolute whirlwind for you, yes?

You can’t imagine. [At] Venice Film Festival, we received this ovation, and [producers and the studio] understood that it would be a long, long run. And then I had work to do and I just said, man, forget it, I’ll be totally into this project now. And it’s been like this. I’m in the last month of my marathon, and it’s quite a marathon. It’s unbelievable. Nowadays, I respect all those actors who do international movies because it’s a hell of a work. I’m really impressed with this. And also, a campaign for the Oscars, or especially for the Oscars and the other awards, was something related to America. My mother, she was nominated and she was mainly working in America, but nowadays, the the voters, they are all over. So I have been traveling, zigzagging over the Atlantic, over the two hemispheres, three continents, and it’s quite a ride. [Laughs]

As you said, the ride for this film started at Venice Film Festival, but it really feels like in the last two months or so that this film has picked up realy traction. There’s been a fire brewing underneath this film. What do you attribute to that emerging love and support?

That’s because we were working before the film came to be noticed. We did a very old-fashioned campaign. It’s not a film that had lots of money to be released. Sony Pictures, who is distributing the movie in America, it’s a very old-fashioned company. So me, Walter, and Selton [Mello], the main actor, we were doing man-to-man screenings, endless Q&As. We didn’t open the movie before January, so we were working [behind the scenes] first in the festivals — that’s when the critics got notice of the movie — and then in each city in order to make the film be seen. That’s why, for instance, we are not such a big thing in the Critic’s Choice, in a lot of awards, because the film had not been seen. And a film in Portuguese. But the Golden Globes was a key moment because the Golden Globes is the international critics who vote, and they have seen the movie in all the festivals that we’ve done before. And from the Golden Globes to now when the film is being noticed, that’s the reason — we were working hard for that.

As the Oscars go, I think everyone knew this film was going to be nominated for Best International Feature. A lot of folks had started saying to watch out for you to get in for Best Actress. But the one that I think really took everyone by surprise was the Best Picture nomination.

Totally. It’s funny because I called Walter, the director, right after the announcement and he hadn’t heard.

Oh, you broke the news.

I broke the news. I said, “And Best Film, Walter! It was nominated!” And he said, “Really?! For Best Film?!” Because for him, the international and the nomination for actress were the main goals for us. And then he didn’t hear it. [Laughs]… It’s a miracle, you see, because the film is spoken in Portuguese, you have to remember that. And a lot of people have problems with subtitles, especially in America. So it’s really a miracle.

We would like to think these award shows are all about performance, but we have seen in the past couple of weeks how much of what can be said by nominees during the voting period can impact the conversation. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that and how you’ve been able to navigate that yourself.

It’s what I told you: The Q&As that we have been doing after Venice Film Festival, it’s another kind of job. It’s a job where you have to present yourself, you have to talk about your thoughts on the movie. And there is a kind of chemic that goes, for instance, with me, Walter, and Selton, that helps to seduce the public to see your movie. So of course, you are a bit of an ambassador, not only to your movie but for us now to a country. You have to think about what you have to say. You have to be careful because sometimes you get so tired that you lose your censorship and you have to remember that you are speaking to a huge audience and it can hurt you if you do not do it right.

For sure. Things can be taken out of context in ways that we don’t always like. And like you said, sometimes things are said that you have to choose to ignore or address or move on. 

Yes. And it’s very terrifying, the size of the Oscar campaign. When I say “the Oscar campaign,” it’s the Globes, all other awards — it’s a long, long, long marathon of festivals and awards and interviews. So it’s a long, long road to make mistakes, and it’s very violent when you lose yourself in the middle. I was afraid because it’s a huge responsibility. You can lose yourself thinking that it’s about you. It can become a vein thing that you are campaigning for yourself. And every time it came to me, I moved back to Eunice thinking, “No, I’m here because of her and I am representing the values that she would defend.” So she’s another great guide. She’s the guide. She is the reason why we are here, and especially I am here.

Turning back to your performance here, when the film starts, we’re at the beach and you’re enjoying the ocean, but the rug is so quickly pulled out from underneath this family. Eunice a. and her daughter are taken to jail for questioning about their husband and father. They are held captive there and almost tortured to get answers out of them, answers they legitimately did not have. Eunice keeps track of the days by etching on the wall. She doesn’t know if her daughter’s alive. She doesn’t know if her husband’s alive. In those moments, of course it was a very isolated incident for her, but for you, you have a film crew around, it’s not as quite isolated, but you need to portray all of that. What was at the heart of all of that for you? What was top of mind as you were going through those two weeks of imprisonment?

First of all, we shot chronologically. So that helped us to really dive in parallel with the character. The key thing in the prison scene is the interrogation, and Walter did something wonderful because normally you can portray the police or the dictator police — almost an SS police from the Nazi time — as dumb, as stupid, as brutal or violent. No, he has chosen a very, very intelligent actor. And that actor, he was a lawyer, so he had a law background, and he’s an amazing actor because one of the things he does in life is he wants to memorize The Iliad by Homer. So he is a very, very skilled actor, and he was terrifying. And in that scene, she has so many levels of worries. She has her daughter who is in the corridor, she’s listening to people being tortured, she discovers at that moment that her husband was doing something related to the guerilla that she didn’t know at all. So he didn’t tell her things and…

For good reason — he didn’t want her to know.

For good reason. And it was not like he had anything to do with guns or war. He was just sending letters to people who were in exile. But she didn’t know that. So of course she’s angry with him. And of course, she knows that the police guy is using the anger in order for her to say bad things about her husband. And then he mentioned her daughter who is in London, and he mentioned that they have been watching them for a long time. So she discovers so many terrifying things that it’s such a rich scene. And of course, it was a tough scene to do, but at the same time, a wonderful scene to do because it was not a shallow scene. So as an actress, I was having the great opportunity to play a scene with depth, but at the same time, it was not comfortable to spend two weeks in that hole, that s—ty hole, feeling anguish, feeling terrified, dirty place. But that’s like the heart of the film and the heart of the change in the film because it’s when she just gave up her utopian life, the life she had before — she understands that there is no way back. And this characters is all about this: Move on, don’t go back. And by doing it, it’s when she becomes herself, which is another great thing of this character — the tragic thing that she faces is when she becomes herself.

Isn’t that so true? It takes a horrible moment, a trauma, something that reveals to us who we have the capability to actually be.

Yes. Once I asked Marcelo, her son, “Do you think she would have become who she had become if your father had not been killed?”And he said, “I always think about it, who she would have become.” Because she was raised to be this great woman behind a great man. So at the same time, this film is a feminist tale without the feminist agenda. It’s different, you see?

Over the course of this story, we get to see you work with so many levels and types of emotion. There’s the joy we see at the beginning of the film — she has a very nice life — but then the fear and grief and resilience and survival, all of that we see come to the surface. Have you ever had the chance to do all of that in one character before?

I never did a character that restrains emotions the way she does. Because that’s the thing — she has five children, so she’s not allowed to stop in the street and cry and get desperate. That’s the key thing about her. She has a huge responsibility, so whatever she feels — anger, desperation, fear — she’s not allowed to show. And this I’ve never done before in such a deep way. As an actor, normally you are trained to show emotions. Oh, look how well I cry. If you cry, you are happy because you cried. If you scream, if you do a scene in high pitch, then you are a good actress. But Eunice was all about hiding emotions. And I never thought that would be so powerful because by doing it, the audience stays in the chair saying, “Please! Cry! Please, do something.” You won’t tell the children. When is she going to tell the children what happened? And then she doesn’t. And that’s the power I think this movie has in the audience. The audience is part of the process because the audience stays with this family feeling for them. It’s all about self-control, and that I’ve never done before. I worked with Walter before — we did a film like 30 years ago; it was our formative movie together. I could see Walter discovering what kind of director he was on that film, Foreign Land. And then later we did another one, then he did Central Station with my mother, and I thought life would never put us together again — especially because in the last 20 years, I did two huge comic series in Brazil. One, it’s like compared to the popularity of Seinfeld here, and the other one like Friends. So I became really popular — not as a comic actress, because they know I’ve done all kinds of theater, whatever — and I never thought Walter would invite someone who was so well-known, especially with comedy now, to play Eunice, even knowing that I can play [both]. So it was quite a surprise and it was very good for me because it put me back to the drama path. [Laughs]

You mentioned your mother, Fernanda Montenegro, she was nominated for a Golden Globe and Oscar in the late ’90s Central Station. What did not just your Golden Globe win, but your Oscar nomination mean to her?

It’s an incredible tale that she was nominated for the Oscars 25 years ago. And now I’m the other Brazilian actress who is nominated for the Oscars with the same director. And she was nominated for the Golden Globes — the film won the Golden Globe — and this year I won the Golden Globe as an actress. And she said something beautiful in a interview on television — because she’s 95, still working as an actress, a producer; she is unbelievable — and she said, “It’s very great that I lived enough to see this.” Ah. So you see…and we have done many things together; we did theater together, television, we did films. I like to say that you have one Fernanda and the other Fernanda, and also this entity, the Fernandas in Brazil. And Brazil now is in a state of a great patriotic feeling because we are very loved there. Brazil is very proud that we had this recognition abroad.

And she is in I’m Still Here. I don’t want to share why or how to not necessarily give anything away, but did you get to be on set the days that she filmed?

No, because we are not together. I visited, but they had shot the scene already and then we just had lunch. And she didn’t visit the sets because it’s very disturbing when you are in the middle of a process. I think a film process is a theater process; it belongs to the people who are doing that at that time. But then she asked to see some scenes, edited scenes, to see what I was doing. And that’s funny because there was a whole part of the movie in between when the disease takes her that my mother was supposed to do. And then when she saw me doing it, she said, “I won’t do it. Because I have to be younger. She has to be older — she is wonderful, she will do it.” So when I thought I was finishing, I had to film one more thing that I didn’t know I was going to do. So it was funny, but then that whole part was cut out from the movie.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Listen to our full interviews with this year’s contenders on The Awardist podcast, below.

Oscar winner predictions: Who will win Best Picture, Actress, and more?

With the Golden Globes in the rearview, it’s full-steam ahead for the 2025 Oscars, which remain a wide-open race amid fallout from Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón‘s explosive controversy involving past offensive comments on X (she has apologized and insists she’s not withdrawing from the race) — a development that might alter the Jacques Audiard-directed musical’s trajectory after it became the most-nominated film of the year. But now, with recent wins at both the Producers Guild and Directors Guild Awards, Sean Baker‘s Anora is firmly back in the mix — but don’t count out Wicked, The Brutalist, and A Complete Unknown. —Joey Nolfi

Read on for EW’s predictions in the top categories, and click here for our full list of 2025 Oscars predictions in every category.

Best Picture

WINNER PREDICTION: Anora
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
Nickel Boys
The Substance
Wicked

At least in the contemporary era, scoring the most Oscar nominations doesn’t always equate to a Best Picture win. Sometimes it means something (Everything Everywhere All at Once, Oppenheimer), but most times it doesn’t (Mank, The Power of the Dog, Joker, The Favourite, etc.) When Emilia Pérez’s 13 nods made it the year’s most-nominated title, its path to victory became slightly clearer amid a wild year of big contenders. That stopped following Gascón’s social media controversy; and while maybe not all Oscar voters will stray from Emilia Pérez‘s corner, enough of them will likely move away from giving Gascón half an excuse to take the stage on Oscars night.

That left us with a couple of different scenarios to choose from. First, many thought momentum might’ve stayed with The Brutalist for the long haul; the lengthy drama landed big wins at the Globes (including Best Motion Picture — Drama, Best Actor — Drama for Adrien Brody, and Best Director for Brady Corbet) at a key point during nominations voting.

Next, given that most in the Oscar prognostication community severely overestimated the Academy’s love for Conclave (it shockingly missed out on a Best Director nod for Edward Berger), it’s also likely that many overlooked A Complete Unknown rising in its place. Given that film’s healthy performance on nominations morning (naturally, it snuck in for Best Director after James Mangold wowed with a DGA nod, and Monica Barbaro edged out the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis and Selena Gomez in Supporting Actress), we could be looking at the passion vote prize-winner of the year.

While some also thought that the aforementioned “prestige” titles could split votes, and a more generally pleasing consensus pick like Wicked could take the top prize, the industry put a grinding halt to that notion at the DGA and PGA ceremonies, where Anora — the first frontrunner of the season, following its Cannes Palme d’Or victory in May 2024 — triumphed with top prizes at two of the most influential precursors on the circuit. That’s a extremely tough statistic to squander. Looks like Anora was on top all along, and everything else was just noise.

Best Director

WINNER PREDICTION: Sean Baker, Anora
Brady Corbet, The Brutalist
James Mangold, A Complete Unknown
Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez
Coralie Fargeat, The Substance

Best Actor

Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
WINNER PREDICTION: Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown
Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice

Best Actress

Cynthia Erivo, Wicked
Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez
Mikey Madison, Anora
WINNER PREDICTION: Demi Moore, The Substance
Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here

Best Supporting Actor

Yura Borisov, Anora
WINNER PREDICTION: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown
Guy Pearce, The Brutalist
Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

Best Supporting Actress

Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown
Ariana Grande, Wicked
Felicity Jones, The Brutalist
Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
WINNER PREDICTION: Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez

Best Animated Feature

Flow
Inside Out 2
Memoir of a Snail
WINNER PREDICTION: The Wild Robot
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Oscars Flashback