Oscar-Nominee Gabriel Domingues on Casting the Standout Ensemble Around Wagner Moura in “The Secret Agent”
Ever since receiving an Oscar nomination in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ first year for the best achievement in casting category, The Secret Agent’s casting director, Gabriel Domingues, has become accustomed to hearing similar reactions across the industry.
“Before every interview I give, people are like, ‘Oh, nice, congratulations! But what does casting mean?’” Domingues recalls with a laugh. “I wasn’t expecting the nomination. I’m super happy and honored to be part of this group for the first time … It’s really fascinating to see things changing and people giving credit and space, elevating the position of casting directors to a creative and sensible artistic position.”
Domingues is nominated alongside Nina Gold for Hamnet, Jennifer Venditti for Marty Supreme, Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle After Another, and Francine Maisler for Sinners. This nomination makes Brazil’s Oscar entry, The Secret Agent, directed and written by Kleber Mendonça Filho, the first international film ever recognized for casting in this category. And with last year’s Oscar winner, I’m Still Here, Brazilian cinema has reached a new peak in film culture.
“I’ve been watching the international scenario and predictions recently, and I feel like Korea has a thing right now. Every year, they have a very strong, competitive movie in the international category,” Domingues says. “I hope Brazil becomes like this — a strong country with a strong cinematographic culture where we have at least one big expressive and important movie being discussed [every year] around the world with Brazilian images, Brazilian stories, Brazilian people, dilemmas, and cultural ideas.”
Set in 1977, described in the opening title card as a period of “great mischief,” Filho’s genre-bending political drama The Secret Agent follows Marcelo (played by Cannes and Golden Globe winner Wagner Moura), a former technology teacher and scientist who moves to Recife, Brazil, during the country’s deadly dictatorship to reunite with his son, Fernando. After being taken in by an older woman named Dona Sebastiana (played by breakout star Tânia Maria), Marcelo finds connection and refuge with other people forced into hiding by the regime.
Filho’s storytelling approach isn’t just rooted in the past, as he periodically cuts to a present-day storyline in which two university researchers listen to Marcelo’s old conversations. While the film explores a dark period of Brazil’s history, Filho and Domingues aimed to avoid “classical images of dictatorship” when casting the faces that would round out the world of 1977 Recife.
Domingues says of the script, “Kleber had very clear and specific ideas on images of how people looked by that time. It includes commentaries on social life and the economy in Brazil at the time, because poverty and inequality were even worse. So it is a symptom of the dictatorship.”
He explains, “It’s a theme of the movie, so we were always discussing those issues while thinking about the options of the actors to play each role.”
Domingues reunited with Kleber on The Secret Agent after working as a casting assistant on 2016’s Aquarius, which was also shot on location in Recife and explored Brazil’s fractured relationship with its history. Working on Aquarius ten years ago helped Domingues understand the nuances of his profession.
“Casting and the dramatic part are so involved, so connected. It’s impossible to think of the casting process without trying to tell the story in the most original or rich way possible,” he says. “It was super important for me to work on Aquarius because we had a very healthy and respectful environment of discussing ideas and debating the possibilities for each character.”
Domingues continues, “When I got to The Secret Agent, Kleber was somebody else. I was somebody else. Brazil was another country, and we were in a very different moment, and all that mattered when we were doing the movie. Fortunately, I had a successful career and did many other movies and TV shows [since 2016], and I could work a lot. So when I got to the point of being invited to do The Secret Agent, I was mature in my professional position. I have created a whole system of how to cast people.”
Breaking down his specific process for The Secret Agent, Domingues says he got involved about six months before production. There were 65 characters to cast in the film, including many of the eventual supporting scene-stealers, such as Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana and Gabriel Leone as Bobbi. While about a third of the cast were actors Kleber specifically wanted to work with (like Moura, who plays three separate characters), the rest were newer faces found through auditions.
In his role, Domingues explains how he is always looking for “interesting people, people who are good to look at, people who are interested in expressing themselves, charismatic people, which are very abstract ideas.”
As has become common in the industry, Domingues initially had actors submit a self-tape. Then, depending on where the selected actors were located, Domingues held a mix of live auditions in São Paulo, Brazil, and some via Zoom. Prospective actors read scenes directly from the shooting script: to cast Flavia [Laura Lufési], one of the archivists in the present-day storyline, Domingues had actors read the character’s final monologue, in which she opens up about her parents to Fernando (the older version, played by Moura).
Similar to Kleber’s previous films Aquarius and Bacurau, The Secret Agent features a mix of established movie stars like Moura (the first Brazilian actor to win best actor at Cannes) and newer faces, creating a vivid portrait of Brazilian life in the ‘70s. “It is a complex balance to mix very well-known faces from other works with new faces,” Domingues says. “Kleber knows Wagner very well, and Wagner knows what kinds of actors Kleber is used to casting in these movies. So it was a surprise for no one.”
For instance, Kleber wanted to work with Maria after she appeared briefly in 2019’s Bacurau as an extra. “She’s so amazing that Kleber gave her a line and then became obsessed with her to the point of rewriting the part especially for her in The Secret Agent. She’s such a lovely person, she’s extraordinary,” Domingues says.
To cast Kaiony Venâncio as Vilmar, the local killer who hunts down Marcelo, Domingues referenced a classic TV program that Kleber remembered as an “emblematic image of a serial killer in the ‘70s. We used him as a reference to find the right actor to play it. He’s not a white Brazilian, but he wears [makeup] of indigenous Brazilian and Afro Brazilian features.”
Working in casting over the past decade, Domingues has observed major industry changes since the pandemic.
“Maybe ten years ago, I had to fly over to some place to meet the people who were there, to invite them to an audition. But now things are simpler, in a way, because everyone has a cell phone,” Domingues says. “The casting directors learn, and the actors learn, and the directors learn how to watch self-tapes and understand the limitations of them.”
Domingues continues, “In a way, I don’t like it because it makes things more distant. But in another way, it’s better because it’s more inclusive. People might be far away, and now you can reach them.”
When asked what he hopes people will understand about casting now that the Academy’s first crop of nominees have set the stage, Domingues says that people often have an all-too “obvious” idea that casting is simply about “discovering someone” and aiming to find the next “big star.”
“I like people when I’m interested in them, I get interested in what they’re doing, if they’re doing theater. Where are they from? What about their culture? What about their origin?” Domingues says. “We try to think what kinds of people are interesting to see in the movie and why, and that’s the good part of casting — usually we don’t know the answer. You can tell what works and what doesn’t work, and we don’t know why. But we have this feeling. It’s more about intuition than anything.”
The Secret Agent is in select theaters now.
