It\u2019s the kind of debate that, Moura feels, has become harder to have than it was in Ibsen\u2019s day. \u201cI think that polarisation is the biggest threat to democracy right now,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea of the truth as we know it is over,\u201d he continues, picking up on the opening line of the play. Disinformation gets amplified in online echo chambers until \u201cfacts don\u2019t 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\u2019t give a f— about the truth, or about democracy. They don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI really believe that the war on drugs is a means of social control in countries like mine,\u201d he says now, by way of example. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eight years ago, Moura moved his family from S\u00e3o Paulo to Los Angeles. Does America feel like home now? \u201cNo,\u201d he says firmly. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
While it doesn\u2019t bother him that \u201cbecause I am Latino, all the characters I play will be Latinos\u201d, what he really wants, he says, \u201cespecially after playing Pablo Escobar, is to get away from the stereotype of the Latino that\u2019s violent, or the \u2018sexy Latino\u2019. 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. \u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the kind of debate that, Moura feels, has become harder to have than it was in Ibsen\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,5343,168438,237406,96,237404,109603,237405,5438,7448,58919,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":["post-717318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-culture","tag-culture-editors-choice","tag-edinburgh-international-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-henrik-ibsen","tag-jair-bolsonaro","tag-narcos","tag-standard","tag-theatre","tag-top-story","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}