Every frame of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Brazilian drama Aquarius is dominated by Sônia Braga. She plays Clara, a retired music critic and public intellectual with a fire in her belly; in person she is no less engaging. Over coffee near her apartment in New York’s East Village, Braga maintains an unfussy, open demeanour. She is the rare actor who actually takes pleasure in the interview process. For Braga, life seems to be a type of performance.

Today, she appears to be playing the part of a well-travelled tourist, dressed in a blue hoodie and black cargo pants with a bumbag strapped around her waist. All she’s missing is camera and a map.

It’s a striking contrast from Clara, a woman to whom glamour comes naturally. At last year’s Cannes festival, where Aquarius had its world premiere, Braga looked every inch a movie star, striking artful poses in designer gowns on the red carpet. “It was my performance art,” she says.

Sex and the City fans may recognise Braga as one of Samantha’s lovers (“I loved playing a lesbian for three days”). The arthouse crowd, meanwhile, will remember her from her splashy dual role in 1985’s Brazilian-American drama Kiss of the Spider Woman. In Brazil, she’s known for her early work in telenovela TV serials. Most recently, she appeared in Netflix’s Marvel show Luke Cage as Rosario Dawson’s mother.

But Braga says she still has to struggle for recognition. “I went to a shopping mall recently with my sister and this woman stopped me, and said: ‘I think I know you. Didn’t you work here in the mall?’ I said: ‘Not yet!’” Braga laughs. “It’s not her fault that she didn’t know me. It’s the system. The system decides who they want people to know – and who they don’t.”

Braga says she never had aspirations to take on “the system” as a minority actor. Back in the 1980s, she planned to return to Brazil to make a film after the press tour for Kiss of the Spider Woman. Weeks before she was to start filming, she was told she had lost the role to a younger actor. “I said: Great, I’m going to stay in America and learn the language.”

‘The script knew all the words and all the feelings I needed to get off my chest’ ... Braga in Aquarius. Photograph: PR company handout

Braga has had an undoubtedly strong career run. She has racked up three Golden Globe nominations, along with an Emmy and Bafta nod. Yet Braga feels she is the victim of an industry that doesn’t afford equal opportunity to Hispanic talent: “I’m Latina: I don’t see my representation [in Hollywood]. Not just as a 66-year-old woman, as a person. Where is it?”

“Not to be chosen for a role – there’s a lot of layers to that,” Braga continues. “Hispanics don’t get too many chances because of the accent. But the British, they have accents too. The business is very unfair.”

Braga is more optimistic about Aquarius. She calls it a “rescue mission”. It has been 20-odd years since she last made a film in Portuguese. “When I got the screenplay, I got my Brazilian tongue back.”

Sônia Braga in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Her enthusiasm is warranted: it is a hell of a part. Inspired in part by Mendonça’s own mother, Clara is a richly textured creation: imperious, sexually vigorous, and vulnerable to the emotional whims of her hot-blooded family. Widowed and well off, Clara lives in the Aquarius, an elegant 1940s apartment building in the seaside town of Recife in north-east Brazil, where she raised her three children, now grown up. When a property firm buys up all the apartments in the building with the intent of knocking it down, Clara resists, despite pressure from her children who smell a boon to their inheritance.

Clara is so opposed to authority that many critics see her character as a metaphor for the resistance to endemic government corruption in Brazil. Braga agrees, marvelling at how the script “knew all the words and all the feelings I needed to get off my chest about my relationship with the country”.

But she counters that Clara is “still a common person” at heart. “When people say Clara is strong, I go, No! She’s a human being, she’s kind, she’s educated, an academic. She had the passion. But there is a point in life where if people push you to some place or take away from you your rights, that’s when you step in.

“I don’t call that strength – I call that necessity. I believe that most women in Brazil have a similar weight to carry. They have the children, and their husbands will either leave them or die on them. It’s their duty to then survive, to work, to provide, to do everything. Nobody wants to be in that position. It’s just what you do.”

At Cannes, Braga was showered with acclaim that carried over to the US when the film opened there last autumn. There was awards buzz: Fernanda Montenegro was the last Brazilian actor to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, for Central Station in 1998. Could Braga be next? Ultimately, she didn’t follow in her stead – which didn’t come as a surprise to Braga.

“The Oscars really only have four spaces for best actress, because one is always reserved for Meryl Streep,” she says, acidly. Still, she isn’t bitter. “Work is the best prize for actors. I got my prize. I worked!”

• Aquarius is released on 24 March.