Diego Calva, the Babylon star who turned a flop into his busiest year

Diego Calva

Photo: John Sears / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 16, 1992 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Babylon, Bird Box Barcelona, On Swift Horses
Awards	Havana Film Festival Best Actor, with Eduardo Eliseo Martínez (shared)

Damien Chazelle saw a headshot of Diego Calva and, by his own account, recognised “the face of a dreamer.” The film he then built around that face, Babylon, lost money, split critics down the middle and looked like the kind of expensive misfire that buries a newcomer before he has a second credit. It did not bury him. The Mexican actor has since played the polished villain Tom Hiddleston hunts in The Night Manager, climbed the Cannes steps twice in one festival, played Che Guevara in a thriller with Al Pacino and signed up for Parker Finn’s remake of Possession. Whether Hollywood would call again is settled. What it keeps calling him to play is the question his career is still arguing with.

He grew up in Mexico City, the only child of a single mother who sat him in front of films to keep him quiet and safe. By his own estimate he watched Disney’s animated short Peter and the Wolf about a hundred times. He was shooting short films with friends as a teenager and went on to study directing and screenwriting at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, the national film school where Mexico trains the people who work behind the camera.

Acting arrived through a side door. In his early twenties (he was born on 16 March 1992) Calva was working the bottom rungs of local productions: catering, dressing sets, holding the boom, running errands as a production assistant. When an actor failed to show up one day, the director told him to step in. His first lead followed in Julio Hernández Cordón’s Te prometo anarquía, as one of two childhood friends, skateboarders, who fund their days by selling their own blood to a clandestine contact in a hospital until the trade turns into a business they cannot control. The role won him a Best Actor prize at the Havana Film Festival, shared with his co-star Eduardo Eliseo Martínez.

Television paid the rent. He was El Rubio in the prison drama El Recluso and, in the third season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, the trafficker Arturo Beltrán Leyva. That was the credit people outside Mexico could look up when Chazelle’s casting call reached him.

The audition for Babylon stretched across the pandemic. Calva sent self-tapes, heard nothing for months, kept rehearsing scenes alone during lockdown, and was finally flown to Los Angeles for a chemistry read with Margot Robbie, after which Chazelle told him he had seen fireworks. Before anyone told Brad Pitt who the newcomer was, the director slipped him onto a commercial shoot as Pitt’s assistant, a private rehearsal for Manny Torres, the immigrant who starts the film hauling an elephant up a Bel Air hill and climbs to an executive job at a studio. Robbie and her husband, the producer Tom Ackerley, put him up in their home for several weeks. His first day on set as Manny was on horseback, chased by some 300 extras.

The reception was harsher than the shoot. Babylon cost a reported $78 million or more and grossed roughly $65 million worldwide, and reviews treated its three hours as either a fever dream or a folly. Calva came out of it with a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a musical or comedy, a shared Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination and, as he admitted years later to The Hollywood Reporter, a fear of being remembered as a one-hit wonder by an industry that had only just learned his name.

He also said something newly famous actors rarely say about the show that made them visible. Promoting Babylon, Calva described Narcos: Mexico as a series with a lot of truth and a lot of lies about his country’s history, and argued that Mexico did not need more narco culture turning those men into heroes, while thanking the show for the job. The friction has not gone away, and he has not resolved it by turning down work. His most watched role since is Teddy Dos Santos in the second season of The Night Manager, a suave Colombian businessman whose charity work hides a privately trained guerrilla army. It is a better-written trafficker than most, and still a trafficker. The menu Hollywood offers Latino actors remains short, and Calva has been saying so in interviews while ordering from it.

The years between Babylon and now were not idle. He played Octavio in Netflix’s Bird Box Barcelona, then went home for Apple TV+’s Midnight Family, as Marcus, one of the siblings running a private ambulance through Mexico City’s nights, and for the Netflix prison series Celda 211. The most revealing choice was quieter. In Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses, adapted from Shannon Pufahl’s novel, he played Henry, a Las Vegas card-room worker in the 1950s who falls in love with Jacob Elordi‘s Julius, a gay love story played with a tenderness that American period films rarely hand to a Mexican actor.

Then the calendar filled. The Night Manager returned to Prime Video in January. In May, Cannes premiered two of his films within days of each other: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, out of competition, with Calva as Nico, a club owner, opposite Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton; and Jordan Firstman’s debut Club Kid in Un Certain Regard, where he plays Oscar, the therapist a reckless party promoter hires for the ten-year-old son he never knew he had. Neon released Refn’s film in July to divided reviews. A24 bought Club Kid after the festival, and Calva carried it to San Sebastián and then home to the Morelia International Film Festival this October.

In June, Tribeca premiered Killing Castro, Eif Rivera’s thriller about Fidel Castro’s 1960 visit to New York, with Diego Boneta as Castro, Al Pacino in the cast and Calva as Che Guevara; no distributor has been announced. Danny Ramirez’s directing debut Baton, a soccer drama shot in Atlanta with Calva in the ensemble, is in post-production. In July, Paramount added him to Possession, Parker Finn’s new version of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 horror film, alongside Callum Turner, Margaret Qualley and Paul Dano.

A24 opens Club Kid in US theaters on 6 November, and Possession is dated for 11 June 2027. Neither is a Manny Torres. That may be the point: the dreamer Chazelle saw in a photograph is now choosing between a Danish provocateur, a first-time American director and a studio horror remake, and the next role he accepts will say more about that negotiation than any interview.