The Day I Stood Naked in Front of Five Hundred People

And I ended up leaving someone obsessed with me

When I acted in “Blindness,” my role was that of the Thief. Anyone who knows the story knows that when he gets stuck with the rest of the group inside the abandoned asylum, the first thing he does is take off his clothes.

He spends the rest of the story in his underwear.

And, as I was lending him my body…

Our play was almost two hours long, and I spent about forty minutes in my underwear. And we performed the play in a large theater, Maria Della Costa, here in São Paulo, with a capacity for five hundred people.

Many times the audience was packed…

And there I was, in my underwear, with a spotlight focused on me, in front of five hundred unknown people.

Honestly? I was not ashamed.

While we are acting, we need to be completely focused on everything we are doing. There are lines to be said, marks to be followed, actions to be taken. It is so much that there is little time for us to think about being ashamed.

But there was an occasion when my mind wandered.

There was a scene in which two characters talked at the stage’s front, and I listened. It was important for the audience to know that I heard, so the director also put me on the stage’s front, but on the opposite side. I had no actions on the scene except to listen; that is, it was a good time for my mind to wander… And it wandered.

In one of the presentations with the house full, I was there, at the stage’s front, listening, and I started to think, “Five hundred people… Five hundred people are seeing me only in my underwear now! Until a few years ago, I almost didn’t let anyone see me like this, half-naked, and right now, five hundred people are seeing me in my underwear!”

Instinctively, I took a step back!

But right after that, I concentrated and “got back to the character,” regaining control of the situation.

Weeks after this presentation, a friend contacted me to tell me something unusual: she had taken an acquaintance to watch the play, and the girl, who was a virgin, began to have a particular obsession with me; after all, I was the first man who she saw wearing only underwear. Because of this, she made a drawing of me in the scene above, in which I was clinging to the railing, only in my underwear, two meters from the floor. It is a pity that I did not find the drawing; otherwise, I would publish it here…

But to see me drawn in this way made me ashamed, too!