EXCLUSIVE: <\/strong>Netflix\u2019s latest Brazilian movie is The Son of a Thousand Men, an adaptation of Valter Hugo M\u00e3e\u2019s novel (\u2018O Filho de Mil Homens\u2019 in Portuguese). It tells the story of Cris\u00f3stomo, a fisherman who has lived outside of mainstream society and dreams of having a son. His life duly changes when he meets Camilo, played by Miguel Martines, an orphan boy whom he fosters. Brazilian star Rodrigo Santoro (300, Love Actually) sat down with Deadline to talk about playing Cris\u00f3stomo, and writer-director Daniel Rezende tells us about the penning the screenplay and directing.<\/p>\n DEADLINE: Daniel, this is not an easy novel to adapt, what was your approach?<\/strong><\/p>\n More from Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n DANIEL REZENDE:<\/strong> I heard from a lot of people that it is a book that\u2019s impossible to adapt because of the way Valter Hugo M\u00e3e dealt with the words in Portuguese; it\u2019s so poetic, it\u2019s so sensorial, it\u2019s so magical. I didn\u2019t think about how hard it would be to adapt. I was completely blown away by the book and moved by its humanity. He described a lot of feelings that I felt completely connected to.<\/p>\n O FILHO DE MIL HOMENS. Rodrigo Santoro as Cris\u00f3stomo, Daniel Rezende as Director in O Filho de Mil Homens. Cr. Marcos Serra Lima\/Netflix \u00a9 2025<\/p>\n DEADLINE: Rodrigo, what did you see within the character of Cris\u00f3stomo?<\/strong><\/p>\n RODRIGO SANTORO:<\/strong>\u00a0He\u2019s profoundly connected to nature and profoundly disconnected from people, to society. That creates a person that is very wise, in one way, because he\u2019s connected to Mother Nature, but also very naive, and free of all kinds of vices and codes that we have in our society. It makes for a very interesting man who is completely open and not judgmental, and somebody who truly listens.<\/p>\n DEADLINE: What did you ask of Rodrigo as the film\u2019s director?<\/strong><\/p>\n DANIEL REZENDE<\/strong>:<\/strong> It\u2019s different from every role that he has done. In the book, Cris\u00f3stomo talks a lot. In the movie, we actually made him pretty silent. He doesn\u2019t speak much.<\/p>\n Something that was very important to me in this movie was to create this reference of masculinity that I don\u2019t see in art. It is a masculinity that is based on listening, empathy and connection. Cris\u00f3stomo grew up apart from society, so he doesn\u2019t know the codes, he doesn\u2019t have the beliefs of society. He\u2019s very connected to nature, but he doesn\u2019t know how to connect to people. He\u2019s not afraid of showing his feelings and he\u2019s not judging.<\/p>\n DEADLINE: Rodrigo, In one sense it is a film about family and adoption, but did you feel there are other themes?<\/strong><\/p>\n RODRIGO SANTORO:<\/strong>\u00a0Cris\u00f3stomo wants to be a father and is looking for a son, but the film goes beyond adopting a person. The movie is trying to explore the idea of adopting \u2018the other\u2019; the other person, adopting the world, adopting yourself, and truly looking inwards in a world in which we\u2019re desperate to find connections, but more and more we\u2019re just staying on our screens. We don\u2019t look into the eyes of another person. We don\u2019t stop to have a conversation.<\/p>\n DEADLINE: You write and direct so have oversight of the words and the look and feel of the film. What were you looking for in terms of the aesthetic and tone?<\/strong><\/p>\n DANIEL REZENDE:<\/strong> It was the first time that I actually wrote a script myself and I had to run away from the words that Valter uses in the book and transform this poetic work into images, into silence, and into situations that felt cinematic. The biggest challenge was to build this magic realism, which has no place, no time.<\/p>\n The photography, the art-direction, the costume design, everything was made for us to not understand where we are, and bring us to this idea of belonging to this place, which is here and now, but it\u2019s also everywhere and at any time. There is a sense of timelessness.<\/p>\n DEADLINE: Daniel talks about sense of timelessness, but what is the resonance for the world we live in today?<\/strong><\/p>\n RODRIGO SANTORO:<\/strong> Cris\u00f3stomo is very contemporary and perfect for the world we live in, and for all the discussions that we are having about masculinity and about connection in a world where we are very much absorbed by how much we have to perform, and how much we have to win.<\/p>\n Best of Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Deadline’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" EXCLUSIVE: Netflix\u2019s latest Brazilian movie is The Son of a Thousand Men, an adaptation of Valter Hugo M\u00e3e\u2019s novel (\u2018O Filho de Mil Homens\u2019 in Portuguese). It tells the story of Cris\u00f3stomo, a fisherman who has lived outside of mainstream society and dreams of having a son. His life duly changes when he meets Camilo, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2154152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[412390,412388,412386,379739,412389,23191,412385,412387],"class_list":["post-2154151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-brazilian-movie","tag-crisostomo","tag-daniel-rezende","tag-deadline","tag-mainstream-society","tag-netflix","tag-rodrigo-santoro","tag-valter-hugo-mae"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rodrigo-Santoro-Daniel-Rezende-On-Family-Adoption-Humanity.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2154151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2154153,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154151\/revisions\/2154153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2154152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2154151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2154151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2154151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n