'City of God' Actor Who Calls the World Home

Rubens Sabino da Silva is best known as Neguinho in Fernando Meirelles's 2002 film City of God. He grew up with his mother and three older sisters in Santa Cruz, in the west of Rio de Janeiro, and left home at the age of eight. He told O Globo that he fled after being beaten at a place his mother attended, and that his father had a drinking problem. After that he wandered the city centre.

As a teenager in the Lapa district he lived with a group of children on the street, and it was there that he learned about the auditions for City of God. He was 18 when he joined the cast. Before that he had appeared in music videos for Deborah Blando and the band O Rappa. He says his fee was 5,000 reais, about 4,500 after the accountant's charge, against the millions the film earned.

In 2012 he took part in a documentary marking ten years since the film. He later said that he felt used by the experience and was left at a bus station with peanuts to sell. The director, Cavi Borges, gave a different account, saying he paid him about 3,000 reais in instalments.

In the 2022 interview, twenty years after the film, Rubens described himself as a famous person living on the street but not a rich one. He said he had been homeless for years, moving between bus stations in Rio, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and the south of the country and asking for money for bus tickets. In 2019 he travelled to Portugal with 480 reais but was sent back. His words were that he had no home and that the world was his dwelling.

He said he still wants to act and sees his acting career as a chance event that may not return. He wanted to make a monologue or short film based on the work of Michel Foucault, as a way of answering through art what has happened to him.