After production wrapped on Babylon, a 1920s Golden Age of Hollywood epic, actor Diego Calva received some advice from the film’s director, Damien Chazelle. “Go travel the world. Walk in your town with no problem. Your life is really about to change. I know you love movies, but sometimes I feel guilty because I am literally going to make it so you won’t be able to walk down the street,” Calva remembers the director telling him. “And I was like, ‘Come on, Damien. What are you saying?’ But maybe it’s going to be true.”
Such is the scale of Babylon, and of Calva’s role in it. He stars as Manny Torres, a film obsessive from Mexico trying to make it in Hollywood nearly a century ago, just as silent movies gave way to talkies. Along the way, Manny finds mischief and camaraderie in the company of two silent-era holdouts—who happen to be played by Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. It’s the 30-year-old actor’s first big English-language role, in a film that’s been in the works since just before the pandemic hit pause on showbiz. The parallels are hard to ignore, as Calva himself points out: Manny “ends up with a great opportunity that changes his life and meets the biggest superstar on the planet. I was meeting Brad Pitt.”
A debut like this one would be heady stuff for any actor, but it was particularly mindblowing for Calva, who himself grew up a movie lover in Mexico City. “When I learned how to play and rewind the VHS, I would just watch Peter and the Wolf over and over and over again,” Calva recalls, when we meet during his first-ever visit to New York City earlier this fall. “I was addicted to the fear that I felt when I heard the [horn] motif of the wolf. That sensation, that feeling.” Once, when his parents grounded him as a teenager, he negotiated visiting privileges at the local Blockbuster. At this point, he reckons he’s seen Goodfellas about 40 times.
The only child of a book publisher and a philosopher, Calva became single-minded about cracking into his hometown’s film scene however he could. He studied directing and screenwriting at film school while taking jobs as a caterer, set dresser, boom mic operator, production assistant—anything to get onto a set. He happened to skateboard, which helped him nab his first lead role, in a 2015 indie called I Promise You Anarchy about a star-crossed, skate-obsessed couple. A stint as a cartel leader on Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico put him in front of a global audience, though the experience led him to think about the balance between scoring big roles and scoring the right ones.
“There’s a moment in your career as an actor that you really can’t choose your roles. You are just grateful that you’re having a job, and Narcos is a great show,” he says. “But in my case, it’s a little hard because the way they put the story of my country, I don’t agree at all. There’s a lot of truth and that’s amazing, but there’s a lot of lies, too. I think my country doesn’t need more narco culture and making these guys heroes.” He started thinking more intently about the kinds of roles he did want, and what those might entail. When the show aired, he remembers thinking to himself, “This is too raw. I don’t know if I really want to keep shooting people.”
The script for Babylon presented an opportunity for a new persona. His journey began with what feels like a showbiz cliché: “I saw a headshot randomly,” Damien Chazelle tells me, “and I was just like, ‘Oh, that’s the face of a dreamer. Those eyes have real poetry in them. Who is this guy? Has he ever acted before?’”
Chazelle, in LA, and Calva, in Mexico City, got to know each other via Zoom after Zoom, as the director tried to imagine how this rookie might fare in a big-league, long-haul role. “He’s in this apartment, he’s got a roommate walking behind him in a bathrobe, and it’s just like, ‘There’s something really special about you.’” Chazelle, though, wasn’t quite sure he could buy Calva as the character—an industry acolyte who, eventually, “becomes a studio exec in the ‘20s.” Chazelle’s wife Olivia Hamilton, also a producer on the film, had been gunning for Calva from the start, and decided to step in. When the director called Calva to LA for a backyard chemistry read, she made sure to put him in a leading-man suit and slick his hair back a bit—to make him look, in other words, like a star.
“I’d almost started to get to the point where I was reconciling myself with, ‘You know what? There may never be the perfect person for this character and we’re just going to have to kind of adapt,’” Chazelle says. “And then to have this moment when I least expected it, literally in my backyard with the two of them, videotaping them on my iPhone and just seeing utter movie-magic chemistry like [Jean-Paul] Belmondo [and] Jean Seberg or Faye Dunaway [and] Warren Beatty. It was amazing. From then on I was like, ‘Okay, no doubt it has to be him.’” Chazelle had his lead, and Calva had his ticket to Hollywood.
Robbie, Calva’s co-star, was just as captivated: “I couldn’t have found the character I played without him. He completely shaped my work just by being the actor that he is and by playing Manny the way he did. It totally changed everything,” she says. “You can be a brilliant actor and not necessarily have that movie star quality. I think he has both. I think he’s a brilliant actor and he has a presence about him that I think will make him the movie star he’s going to be.” She made special note of how good his cheekbones look on camera.
Working with Calva, Robbie says, brought her back to her first big break. “It reminded me of the experience I had working on Wolf of Wall Street,” she says. “This is his first [American movie], he’s doing scenes with Brad Pitt and being directed by Damien Chazelle. I was still like, "Oh my God, I can’t believe that this is the first American movie. What the hell?’” But big breaks can be particularly lonely, so Robbie, who noticed Calva had been going home solo to his hotel room after work—he’d watch movies, mostly, like when he was grounded as a teenager—invited him to stay with her and her husband, Tom Ackerley. “Better to be grounded in Margot Robbie’s house playing cards all night,” Calva remembers.
By the fall, Calva was finally in New York to promote a movie he’d spent the better part of the last three years making. So far, he had spent most of it in and around a tall office tower just off Times Square, doing interviews like this one, breaking to step out for a slice and then for a showing of The Book of Mormon. He was still heeding Chazelle’s advice, waiting out his own possible tectonic shift. He’d like to keep making movies in English, but home is still Mexico City, where he wants to build his career and work with the foremost directors of Spanish-language film.
Of course, if Chazelle’s prophecy comes true, Calva will have a unique set of Hollywood problems. “My dream is to be part of Latin American cinema always,” he says. “My only fear right now is that maybe Latin directors are going to think, ‘That guy will never come back,’ and they are not going to call me.”
Eileen Cartter is a staff writer at GQ
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Julius Frazer
Styled by Brandon Tan
Grooming by Barry White for barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
