We all give lip service to the idea that actors aren’t really like the characters they portray, but it’s hard not to tense up a bit before meeting Seu Jorge, who was the menacing, dead-eyed street hood Knockout Ned in Fernando Meirelles’ City of God.

The surprise is that not only is he a gentle man, a loving dad to a three-year-old girl, but he grew up – like Ned – in the rough favela streets and avoided their angry influence.

Ned, he said, “was very close to my life and very far way from my own choices. This guy chose vengeance and he died in the arms of vengeance. I made another choice.”

The groundwork for that other path, Jorge said, began at home with a loving family. “Despite the fact that I was poor,” he said, “I had a good childhood because my parents not only loved each other but loved their kids as well. They were very tender – a lot of love. They did everything to keep their kids out of trouble.

“For them the real measurement of success was that I become a man with dignity, a man with his own internal compass and was not compromised.”

That internal compass led him to always be a bit of a loner, apart from the other kids. He began work of the age of 10, fixing flat tires, and he avoided fights, despite the tempestuous nature of life in streets of his neighborhood, Baixando de Fluminense.

Although he left school at the age of 13, Jorge said his “post-graduate” work began when he, as a teenager living on the streets, was asked to join a group of people that were rebuilding and reviving an old theater at the University of Rio. He recalled that virtually living in the old, broken-down theater was the first time he had a roof over his head for years.

“It was my way of getting out,” he said, noting that he learned about the various aspects of theater, from lighting to Shakespeare.

Jorge was in a documentary about Brazil by a Finnish director, but his big break was the featured role in City of God, which was based on real-life stories of young favela dwellers.

In parallel to his theatrical career, he began to slowly discover the joys of playing music. He said that as a shy young man, music helped him break the ice with friends as well as with women. “I didn’t want to see it as career, just something to be experience and enjoyed. I thought it wouldn’t work out if I thought of it as career.

Looking back, he said he had a “deep inferiority complex,” because he was so poorly educated and dressed and that he had never been well-nourished, never having eaten three meals in a day. Music, however, helped him break free of these “complexes” and he eventually gained some success with the samba-pop band Farofa Carioca, and he had a hit solo album called Samba Esporte Fino. It was a fellow musician who gave him his nickname, a play on seu’s two meanings, “sir” and “yours.” Jorge was seen as so giving to his audiences, he was literally “theirs.” The parallel pursuits of music and acting serendipitously came together after Meirelles recommended him for a part in Wes Anderson’s movies The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

In the movie, Anderson had written a part for a black Brazilian who was one of the lead character’s assistant seamen, but also played his own usical compositions. Jorge got the role and eventually the musical selections evolved into rewritten bassa nova-esque versions of classic David Bowie songs. The seemingly wacky juxtapositioning of styles was one of the most-talked-about aspects of the film and Jorge became the new next big thing from Brazil.

Despite the unprecedented attention from Life Aquatic, Jorge is ambivalent about the making of the film. While he has nothing but praise for the crew, he said the filming on location in Rome was a very difficult time for him personally.

At first, he said, he was living with his wife and young daughter in a small apartment, where he also had to work on his music for the film. To relieve that stress, they moved to bigger quarters, but Jorge said there was no getting away from the racism he encountered on a daily basis in Rome.

He recounted one incident among many bad moments. He was walking down the street one evening, pushing his daughter in a stroller when he walked past a shop selling antique instruments. Curious, he pushed open the half-open door, and was immediately confronted by an antagonistic shopkeeper, who asked what he wanted. Jorge aksed if he could come in and the man asked why. When Jorge explained, the man eventually relented, but said he had to leave the stroller outside. After Jorge protested, the man said he had thought it was a street cleaner’s garbage can, since many of the street cleaners in Rome are black, Jorge said. The storeowner told Jorge that if he wanted to look at one antique guitar, he would have to give him money up front. Jorge gave the man the money, then walked out of the store, smashed the guitar on the street, then walked back into the store, smashed guitar in hand.

“Here,” he told the shopkeeper. “You don’t want my money, I don’t want your guitar.

“The daily life in Italy was so thick with racism, it was just unbearable,” he said, so he stayed home as much as possible. “I didn’t want to go to work with the deep unhappiness and have it seep into the work.”

Due in part to the notices he was getting the film, the French label Wrasse has released Cru, Jorge’s recent album that he created for the French, because, “Of all the people in the world, they are the most interested in Brazilian music.

“I wanted,” he continued, “to do something that was less symbolic of the stereotypes of Brazil – the soccer, the samba, the ass – and do something that was pure music.”

Cru begins with two or three breezy sambas, but the album then slows and quiets down, including on English-language version of the Elvis Pressley hit “Don’t” and a remake of Serge Gainsbourg’s meditation on suicide, “Chatterton.”

Jorge ends the album with the song “Eu Sou Favela” (“I am the favela”), in which he talks about the good people with whom he grew up and who are poor and marginalized.

For the future, he said, “I’d like to explore a record from the American point of view because America is ready for a new wave of Brazilian music.”

He said it would be more rock-y and go “back to the roots” of American music, such as jazz and rhythm and blues. For now, the man born Jorge Mario Da Silva is enjoying his unlikely twin-career ride, aware of how far he’s traveled and with a realistic view of where he is in the world.

-Marty Lipp