The actor left Brazil 8 years ago to accompany his wife and has had success in Portugal

With 35 years of television career, Vitor Hugo records his sixth telenovela in Portugal. The actor is part of the cast of ‘Huíla’, a fiction of the TVI channel whose main setting is a farm in the interior of Angola, a country in East Africa with strong ties to Brazil.

His previous work was ‘Cacau’, on the same channel, a soap opera partially recorded in the south of Bahia. Currently, the Brazilian public can see him in the rerun of ‘Cabocla’ in the afternoons of Globo.

Vitor Hugo, originally from Rio, left the country in 2016 to accompany his wife, literature professor Renata Graça Aranha, who was accepted into a doctoral program in Lisbon. The couple’s three children also came on board. The idea was to stay in Portugal for only 1 year.

“I had the option to renew my contract with Record or not. I didn’t renew it,” the artist told the program ‘Goucha’. He had appeared in many of the channel’s productions, such as “Opposite Lives”, “King David”, “Deadly Sin”, “The Ten Commandments” and “The Rich Man and Lazarus”.

In deciding to stay in Portugal, he had an admirable attitude. “On my birthday (March 3), I went to Castelo de São Jorge and asked permission (to live in the countryside),” he said, referring to the historic building atop the Portuguese capital.

“It’s something we’ve lost a little. The lands have their scent, their ancestors, and we have to venerate those who built the path we walk. We’re a little arrogant, we think the world is here so we can travel,” reflects the artist, who graduated in Philosophy. In search of a new life, the artist followed the opposite path of her ancestors, born in Alentejo.

“The fact that you come with family, and family is your foundation, means you are not alone. The pains are shared. Your fear is fixed by your wife’s affection, your wife’s fear is fixed by you. Your children fulfill you,” he said of the process of adjusting to another country.

Supported by friends, such as director Edgard Miranda, who also left Record for Portugal, Vitor Hugo sought opportunities in television fiction at TVI. In 2017, he made his first telenovela there, “A Herdeira.” Other invitations appeared, including one for “Dança com as Estrelas,” a competition similar to Globo’s “Dança dos Famosos.”

To compose the new character, the cowboy of ‘Huíla’, the actor read a classic of Brazilian literature. “I went to João Guimarães Rosa, (author of) ‘Grande Sertão: Veredas’. Riobaldo is rustic poetry on earth, he inspired me.”

The character in the novel – played by Tony Ramos in the version produced by Globo in 1985 – is a gunman immersed in questions about life and death, about the existence of God and the devil.

Fascinating and enigmatic, just like Vitor Hugo himself, an actor who seems to make every performance an exercise in self-knowledge and a new connection with the audience.

Source: Terra