Deborah Cicco runs on a treadmill wearing a tight T-shirt printed with colorful little mouths. Her skin glowed moistly at the generous neckline. “The program is great, I do what I want,” she shouts nervously as she gets off the device and lights a cigarette. At the age of 46, she returns to play Raquel, the prostitute Bruna Sorvestina, 14 years after the film that caused a stir in the country’s cinemas and propelled the actress’s career.
Like the one where she complained about presenting a show, the scenes for “Bruna Surfistinha 2” were actually recorded in São Paulo. In Part Two, Raquel, who stopped prostituting herself at the end of the first film, goes through a turning point in her life and considers returning to sex work. But time also passed for her.
The blog where she shared hot stories about her services that made her famous is making way for adult content platforms — like OnlyFans and Privacy in real life, where subscribers pay for access to explicit videos and photos posted by users.
By questioning the limits of prostitution, the second film wants to pay homage to its predecessor, which made a taboo topic a topic of the moment in 2011, when it was released. The film attracted more than two million people to cinemas that year, a number considered excellent for a national production. This public phenomenon has also sparked widespread public debate about morality, exploitation, the sex industry, and female sexuality.
“Bruna Surfistinha” was based on the true story of Raquel Pacheco, an upper-middle-class girl who chose to leave home to become a prostitute. She gained national fame as Bruna Survestinha when, in the 2000s, she posted on her blog sensational details of her services as a call girl. She also wrote the book “Sweet Scorpion Venom” in which she candidly described the psychological and physical abuse experienced by sex workers in the country.
The film became a cultural landmark for its depiction of prostitution in Brazil from the point of view of sex workers, with nude and sexual scenes starring a Globo actress. Bruna’s poignant phrases, such as “Today I won’t give, I’ll distribute”, made the character a popular icon.
Wearing a white bathrobe and drinking Coca-Cola Zero while filming “Bruna Surfistinha 2,” Deborah Secco says she decided to make a sequel to the film when she went to the Vogue party in 2023, as Bruna. She was wearing a light blue bikini, short shorts and high-heeled shoes of the same color, and was carrying a surfboard. Fans lined up for hours to take a photo with the actress. “I felt like Disney’s Mickey,” the artist recalls. “I realized the character was iconic and became bigger than I could have ever imagined.”
Today, it’s hard to talk about porn without taking into account tech companies like OnlyFans. Although they do not involve the provision of direct sexual services, and generally operate more as a digital commerce of erotic content, these platforms are linked to the logic of prostitution of exchanging sex for money, and in some cases, physical encounters can occur after online contact. “Today there is a lot of ‘hate’ online,” says Deborah Sekou. “We have a society that is very fragmented into bubbles of different ideas.” “It’s a great time to open up this discussion,” says the actress.
Technological advances have also fostered feminist discussions that did not exist in 2011 and were excluded from the first feature film. “We adjusted the points of view, because the interests and discussions are different,” says Marcus Baldini, ahead of the first film and its sequel. In another scene from the movie “Bruna Surfistinha 2,” for example, in short, tight shorts, Sekou portrays Bruna and records a video with her cell phone, in which she teaches women how to stimulate themselves to feel pleasure during sex.
The story of “Bruna Surfistinha 2” is completely fictional, although it contains one or two events inspired by the real life of Raquel Pacheco, the real Bruna, who calls Seco from time to time to tell him something. In the first film, Raquel, before becoming Bruna, had an estranged relationship with her parents and became a laughingstock at school.
She leaves home at seventeen, after a boy leaks a photo of her performing oral sex, and goes to a brothel, where she begins performing and making friends with other women in the same situation. In a way, prostitution seems to satisfy their emotional needs.
The film did not emerge unscathed from criticism. Some people pointed out the excessive sensual scenes to arouse the audience’s curiosity, without delving into Raquel’s motives. “I never made Raquel a heroine. She chose to put herself in this place of suffering and pain. We didn’t shoot sex scenes to be sexy. We needed to show the discomfort of this girl who serves eight men a day,” Seko commented, about the ratings. “It was difficult to convey its reality without making it ‘pornographic’, because it is a story about physical exploration,” he adds.
Now, during the filming of “Bruna Surfistinha 2”, the sex scenes are monitored by an intimacy coordinator. The presence of this professional on film sets increased after the MeToo movement, a women’s movement that exposed the sexual harassment faced by actresses behind the scenes in the American film industry. However, Sekou says she didn’t feel uncomfortable during the spicy segments in the first film — for her, each had a narrative purpose.
The fear of accepting the role was great. “I was afraid that I would become a stereotypical actress and that my career would be forever,” Sekou recalls. But she had just asked for a leave of absence from Globo Film Production Company, and opportunity was knocking at the door. She says she called her mother and some directors she trusts: Joel Ares, Jorge Furtado and Daniel Filho. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t do it,’” he says. When he realized this, he had already signed the contract and was training.
At the time, she did not escape the occasional sexual and degrading comments. But today she says she is protected. “I feel stronger, as if I have created a protective covering for the difficulties that public life provides.”
When asked if she would accept a debut role more easily these days, she answered emphatically. “Not yet. A lot of things have evolved, but I think we’re going through a very strong wave of conservatism.”
With “Bruna Surfistinha”, Secco received acting awards. She was one of the most cited celebrities in the press in 2011 and was named the sexiest woman in the world by VIP Magazine, a men’s magazine that no longer exists. After that, she traveled to Hollywood with the encouragement of Steven Spielberg, and upon her return to Brazil, she accumulated roles in Globo soap operas. “I think this story was supposed to be my story, I don’t know, a karmic thing,” he says.
When incorporating Raquel, the actress found similarities with the woman. “Growing up I wasn’t the most popular girl in school, like Bruna. I was the ugly girl in the family. When my career took me to this place where I became a beautiful woman, which I didn’t think I was, it was great, until it started getting bad. You’re in a battle to prove that you’re also good at what you do, not just pretty.”
Secco had already become a sex symbol years before “Bruna Surfistinha,” when she posed nude in 1999, at the age of 20, for Playboy magazine. Before this, she had played more masculine roles, such as the tomboy Carol in “Confessões de Adolescente” or Barbara in “Vira Lata”, who disguises herself as a boy for most of the story. In 2002, the actress took new photos for a men’s magazine.
Siko says the trials ensured his family’s financial stability. “I bought three apartments, one for myself, one for my sister and one for my brother. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t comfortable. And unlike the movie, it was me, Deborah, who was exposed there.”
The money was a guarantee for someone who wanted to bet everything on her acting career. “I grew up watching the movie ‘Pretty Woman,'” she recalls. “My dream was to be that girl carrying bags with the boy’s money. But, at some point, I realized I had to dream of being an independent woman, paying for my own bags, and having a job that would meet my needs, where I wouldn’t be objectified or exploited.”
“Today I no longer want to prove anything to anyone,” says Siko. His concern is his ten-year-old daughter. In the first years of the girl’s life, the actress felt helpless because she was unable to protect her child from a world that was not kind to girls, a pain she now suffers on a daily basis. As other middle-aged artists, such as Fernanda Torres and Kate Winslet, have recently noted, Sekou quietly says that security comes later for women.