In 2003, a low-budget DVD release surfaced, titled Xuxa: Strange Love . It featured a lurid cover of Xuxa in a wet shirt, nipples visible. The release was unauthorized by Xuxa’s estate, but it flew off shelves in São Paulo’s 25 de Março street market. Film students and trash-cinema aficionados began rediscovering it as a work of “bad art”—a fascinating, uncomfortable time capsule of Brazil’s post-dictatorship id.

It was in this liminal space that producer and director José Antônio Garcia saw an opportunity. He wanted to make a psychological erotic thriller—something dark, Freudian, and deeply uncomfortable. He needed a star who could embody innocence corrupted by desire. He needed Xuxa.

Xuxa later claimed she was misled. “They told me it was a love story, a drama about loneliness,” she said in a 1995 interview. “I was a model. I didn’t read the full script. My mother was on set. But when I saw the finished film, I cried for three days.”

Prologue: The Queen’s Shadow

Yet, paradoxically, the film’s infamy only deepened her mystique. For a generation of Brazilian Gen Xers, the memory of accidentally glimpsing the film on late-night TV is a shared trauma—and a guilty curiosity. Xuxa herself has never fully escaped it. In her 2017 documentary, Xuxa: O Documentário , she addressed it for exactly 47 seconds: “I was naive. It was a different time. I carry that shame so that young actresses today don’t have to.”