With ‘I’m Still Here,’ Brazilian Icon Fernanda Torres Goes Global

It’s been nearly three months since Fernanda Torres was last in Brazil. Over Labor Day weekend, the Rio de Janeiro native traveled to Venice for the world premiere of I’m Still Here, her first movie since the pandemic, which reunited her with Walter Salles, director of her 1996 film Foreign Land. Coming off rave reviews and a prize for best screenplay, I’m Still Here screened for a wider audience in Toronto, with Torres in tow. She then went down to New York for a month, where the movie made its US debut—and where she got to catch up on her competition: Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (“Marianne Jean-Baptiste? It’s unbelievable”), Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (“Wonderful”), Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (“Zoe Saldaña: She sings. She acts. Come on. It’s almost annoying. How can you be so good at so many things?”). Finally, Torres wrapped a 25-day stint in Hollywood, presenting I’m Still Here to voters for the Oscars, Golden Globes, SAG Awards, and more.

Following her first trip to the Governors Awards just over a week ago, she’s returned home—for now. But as I’m Still Here continues to screen for industry members here in Los Angeles, one senses Torres’s life on the campaign trail is just getting started. (She’s flying back to LA right after New Year’s.) Anecdotally, the film is emerging as one of the most beloved discoveries around town, a lovingly crafted and rousing portrait of Eunice Paiva (Torres), a housewife turned activist in ’70s Rio whose husband, former congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), is apprehended by the dictatorial regime taking power in their country. Torres’s tranquil, elegant, powerful portrayal has earned her a spot in a stacked best-actress race fronted by megastars Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, and Demi Moore.

Not that Torres is any slouch when it comes to fame. The 59-year-old is the daughter of iconic Brazilian actors Fernando Torres and Fernanda Montenegro, the latter of whom plays an older Eunice in I’m Still Here. At 20, Torres won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her spellbinding turn in the marital drama Love Me Forever or Never. She’s gone on to draw sold-out crowds on stage, including in a lauded solo show adapted from João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s novel A Casa dos Budas Ditosos; write scripts for feature films and streaming TV series; anchor hugely popular sitcoms like Slaps & Kisses; and sell more than 200,000 copies locally of her debut novel, The End.

“To be a modern artist nowadays, you have to be alive in many places in order to survive. If you keep waiting for an invitation for a film or whatever, you’ll be dead,” she says. “You have to reinvent yourself all the time. So it’s very good to get older. That’s a very good fact of aging.”

Growing up, Torres’s parents rehearsed at the dining table. “I really enjoyed sitting there after school—they were doing Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller,” Torres says. From birth, she felt her destiny as an artist, carrying on in their tradition: “Come on. My father was called Fernando. She’s called Fernanda. I’m called Fernanda. Freud should do a case about my family.”

She got her start on camera as a child, and by the time she’d turned 18, she already found herself being pulled in different directions. When Love Me Forever or Never premiered in Cannes, for instance, Torres was stuck back home. “I was the leading lady of a soap opera, and I hated it. I was hating it with all my heart,” she says. “She cried, she was dumb—I couldn’t stand it anymore.” Rumors swirled that she was in the running to win best actress at the festival, but she couldn’t leave her day job. Sting wound up presenting the award without her in attendance. “I was so sad that I didn’t receive the award from the hands of Sting,” Torres says now. “But in Brazil, it was like the World Cup—I was walking in the streets with people screaming.”

At the same time, Brazil’s film industry was slowing down. “I thought I’d do one movie after the other when I came back, but cinema was over in Brazil,” Torres says. She did an acclaimed stage production of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando instead, while still dabbling in features when she could—including linking up with a then-hotshot filmmaker in Salles. Foreign Land allowed Torres to shine in a searing tale of immigration and loneliness. “We were like kids. He was very fast. We did stunts together in a very old car he was driving without seat belts; the third time we spun out, and the car almost rolled over—and then we said, ‘It’s fine!’” she says. “We could’ve died. It’s the kind of thing that you do when you are young.”

Salles developed a working relationship with Torres’s mother, too. Generally, Torres has embraced the link to her parents, the feeling of carrying on Brazilian art. “Nowadays in this mean world that we live in, it’s called ‘nepo babies,’” Torres says. “But this is such a tradition, the circus family, and this is something beautiful. It is a job that you can learn by watching, by mimicking, by living in an environment. It’s like doctors. But no, nowadays they’ve decided that we are ‘nepo babies.’ Such a silly world.”

On screen over the years, Torres has come to be known for her work in comedy—specifically, broad TV comedy. In Slaps & Kisses, she played an outspoken bridal-shop employee dating a married man, amassing a significant fanbase on the strength of her go-for-broke performance as a teary, sometimes rageful, often hilarious flirt. When I met Torres in Los Angeles earlier this month, she described Salles casting her in I’m Still Here as “rescuing” her from comedy—it’d become all she was known for.

Over Zoom a few weeks later, she clarifies: “People thought I was a comedian because I was so popular,” she says. “Go on the internet. I mean, I’ve survived with the young generation because I became memes. My memes in Brazil were like a fever. I’m very proud of them. I find memes a superior form of art.” Of course, Torres also considers herself more than a meme, even if she still delights in that aspect of her career. “I like tragicomedies. Brazil is a tragicomic country. I’m a tragicomic actress.”