Do we like Fernanda Torres?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long, steady career on the right side of the issues we checked, held back only by an old blackface sketch she has since apologised for.
Fernanda Torres was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965 into Brazilian acting royalty: her mother is the actress Fernanda Montenegro and her father was the actor-producer Fernando Torres. She grew up backstage and started acting as a teenager. By 20 she had a Best Actress prize from Cannes for a 1986 film.
She did not coast on the family name. She wrote newspaper and magazine columns from 2007 and published a novel, Fim, in 2014. It reportedly sold more than 200,000 copies and was adapted for TV. Then came I'm Still Here, in which she plays Eunice Paiva, a woman rebuilding her life after her husband disappears under Brazil's military regime, and it took her to a Golden Globe in January 2025.
The one real stain is from the same awards season. After her Oscar nomination, footage resurfaced of her in blackface in a Brazilian TV comedy sketch from the mid-2000s. She told Deadline she was very sorry, and said the racist history of blackface wasn't widely understood in Brazil at the time. Fair enough, and she apologised quickly rather than digging in.
On the harm test, we found no anti-LGBTQ+, anti-vax or climate-denial words from her. In a 2015 interview she called it insane that homophobia wasn't a crime in Brazil. Her recent work looks clean too, though the sources we could open mainly covered the one film, so the record there is thin.
She has also been blunt about what authoritarianism does. She told Reuters the film showed what it means when a regime can enter your house, and she said Eunice Paiva was almost a guide for periods of crisis. She tied the film to Brazil's real coup plot, saying the country was on the edge of something done by people who admired the dictatorship.
The latest stoush was a Havaianas ad in December 2025 in which she told viewers to start the year with both feet rather than on the right foot. Eduardo Bolsonaro posted a video of himself binning a pair of the sandals, and the boycott calls followed. Neither Torres's spokesperson nor Havaianas offered a comment, so how much she meant by it is for you to judge.