It’s the kind of debate that, Moura feels, has become harder to have than it was in Ibsen’s day. “I think that polarisation is the biggest threat to democracy right now,” he says. “When I was younger, the Right and the Left would fight, but we would see the same thing. Today, because of the spread of fake news, they are seeing one thing and we are seeing something else, parallel universes.
“The idea of the truth as we know it is over,” he continues, picking up on the opening line of the play. Disinformation gets amplified in online echo chambers until “facts don’t matter any more. And I think the technology companies have a lot of responsibility in creating this situation: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos; those guys don’t give a f— about the truth, or about democracy. They don’t care.”
Moura was only nine years old when Brazil finally emerged from a 40-year period under military dictatorship but he remains wary of taking civil liberties for granted. “I really believe that the war on drugs is a means of social control in countries like mine,” he says now, by way of example. “The police in Brazil are not trying to protect the citizens. The police in Brazil are trying to protect the state. The state chooses who their enemies are. And usually their enemies are people who live in the favelas.”
Eight years ago, Moura moved his family from São Paulo to Los Angeles. Does America feel like home now? “No,” he says firmly. “There are many things about the country that I really admire, but there is something there that makes you feel like a foreigner all the time.”
While it doesn’t bother him that “because I am Latino, all the characters I play will be Latinos”, what he really wants, he says, “especially after playing Pablo Escobar, is to get away from the stereotype of the Latino that’s violent, or the ‘sexy Latino’. I want to go for the characters that all the American white dudes are going for. I want to play the journalist, the doctor; people like the guy in The Last House, you know? His name is Jason. And he is just like me. ”