Diego Calva’s Wide World of Ideas

For most cinephiles, Diego Calva burst onto the scene in Damien Chazelle’s 2022 maximalist epic Babylon, playing a doe-eyed immigrant looking to crack into the early Hollywood shuffle. But those tapped into the international indie circuit might have named his breakout role 2015’s I Promise You Anarchy, as a young hustler scrambling for a better life in his native Mexico City. The truth—of Calva’s life, career, and ambitions—is somewhere in the middle.

Last month, Calva discovered that Atlanta is not all Southern sunshine while shooting Danny Ramirez’s directorial debut (“It’s a movie with a lot of Latinos, thankfully”) and promoting The Night Manager, the British spy thriller in which he plays a Colombian arms dealer in its second season. Because of an unfortunate timing delay, he’d also been flying back and forth to do pre-production work on a film back in Mexico—an unfortunate stacking up of projects Calva considers disrespectful to the attention each merits.

“You can’t always control these things, and if you already have a responsibility to something, you can’t say no,” he says (in Spanish, as with the rest of the conversation). “At least I’m not filming both at once. Imagine trying to really inhabit a character in addition to your brain’s natural schizophrenia, and then adding a third mindset? It’d be like having a threesome with myself, which sounds horrible.”

Calva’s droll sense of humor makes itself immediately apparent, as well as a thoughtfulness that seems to stem from earnest curiosity. His conversation evokes the platonic ideal of an artist: someone whose interest in a successful creative career must be grounded in a genuine devotion to culture. Just over a decade ago, he was a skater who’d dropped out of film school and began making short films on his own. Then Anarchy’s director Julio Hernández Cordón messaged him on Facebook to say he’d gotten fourteen professional skaters together for a movie, but none of them dared to do a man-on-man kiss. “And, really, that’s how I got my first acting job, for being able to kiss a guy,“ Calva laughs.

Even with the relative success of the movie (and of his performance, which he credits having pulled off with “the gift of ignorance” that he hopes never to fully shed), Calva didn’t consider himself an actor: “I did that movie to get into the industry and thought, afterwards, I’d sell some screenplay to Netflix. It wasn’t until after Babylon that I fell in love with it and said, Alright, this is acting. But Anarchy gave me my first taste of enjoying performance because, before then, I wouldn’t even take off my shirt with my partners or at the beach. I got completely naked in front of sixty people for that movie and decided never to get dressed again.”

That confidence then took him to Hollywood, where he says his inability to speak English cost him acting gigs, but he found work in sound departments, construction, and as a driver. It was through these odd jobs that he learned the practical language employed on a film set, built by “the great film pioneers who created this system, quasi-military at times, that keep the machine moving.”

“It’s why there aren’t twenty-five directors and one production assistant,” he explains. “There’s a logic to the hierarchy that doesn’t mean anybody’s worth less. It’s understanding that sometimes someone has to hold your umbrella, not because you’re someone who deserves it, but out of respect to the makeup artists, to the character, to the camera operator, so you don’t get sunburnt or wet and ruin their work. I’ve spoken film across three countries’ industries now, and it’s all the same. A movie with a small budget, the catering might not be as good, but when they call Action, I know exactly what I have to do.”

Though he says there’s no throughline connecting his characters, Calva notes an attraction to charismatic strays, street-smart people who resist understanding, offering Teddy, from The Night Manager, and Henry, the lover of Jacob Elordi’s character from the vastly underrated 2025 film On Swift Horses, as examples. “Exhibiting charisma while being completely broken inside is something that I think connects me to my characters,” he muses. “It’s a superpower to be able to smile and be crying inside.”

Calva has a casual but considered affect when speaking about his career, with a recognition of his lack of acting training that stops just short of self-deprecation. Each of his roles has been crafted differently, and the actor says he enjoys not having settled into a definitive method. His interests and ambitions align with this journeyman trajectory, and Calva has the enviable ability to zigzag through grand topics and ten-dollar references without evoking eyerolls. It feels fresh and earned when he speaks about re-reading Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments and Greek tragedies to grasp Teddy’s tragic journey, or how he’d want any forays into stage acting to be in stylized, embodied projects like Ionesco’s Bald Soprano, Russian clowning, or Butoh, which he calls “the most mysterious and profoundly dramatic” art form. He muses: “It’s all about the cadence, not any important character. It’s all in the face, the same way film can sometimes be about making the most deliberate expression.”

Duration appeals to him, be it long takes, stage work (“Theater scares me almost as much as my mother, but I’d love it”), or the chance to develop a character throughout multiple seasons. James Gandolfini being asked by The Sopranos writers what his character would do is a north star of extended, symbiotic character analysis, though Calva’s apprehensive about serialized storytelling. “Of course I’m interested in that, but the formats can’t be fighting each other the way they are now,” he says. “Streaming is killing film, and if that continues, then I’d have to go against television. It was making a movie that saved my life, not streaming reruns.”

Culture and civics frequently intertwine in Calva’s conversation, as he expresses delights and frustrations with Mexico’s current state of artistic affairs. He loves fresh homegrown talents like Natalia Beristáin, Alonso Ruizpalacios, and Lau Charles, but mourns the fact there is no legislation to encourage support for native cinema and that American films have weakened other countries’ industries. “It should be illegal for The Avengers to occupy ten out of twelve auditoriums here. We should have Mexican movies in at least forty percent of our screens,“ he insists. He also believes a percentage of ticket sales for foreign films should go toward the Mexican film industry. “The problem, too, is that the Mexican filmmaker has also lost the responsibility to their public,” Calva says. “They want to win over, say, the French, so they make the movie about the cool narco or the suffering single mother, because that’ll play well over there, but not here.”

He’ll eventually move behind the camera and hopes to shoot a screenplay he’s been writing about his mother (“my final boss and my first friend”) and grandma, in whose stories he feels he can track the history of Latin America. Despite that ambitious scope, he maintains that a film is the only proper medium for the project: “It has to be a movie, because it would need to work as some sort of tissue for her to stop crying, and I’m not going to cut up this tissue in seven so she could wipe up individual tears with each episode.”

That time will come, as he observes that “if I already think acting in two movies is disrespectful, imagine directing a film and acting in another. So the moment will come when I’ll stop acting and take my time to direct, but right now, in front of the cameras is where I’m happiest and most free.” He doesn’t discuss the movie he’s developing with Pimienta Films, a Mexican producer-distributor, but says optimistically that it’s the correct project for him after The Night Manager. “I mean, I still have my Polo jeans on, we’re all vain capitalists,” he laughs. “But I’d like to work with certain directors and tell certain types of stories, and in Mexico, what I always want is to help produce. If two Night Managers help get a Mexican movie made because it stars Diego Calva, then they’re worth it.”

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