Diego Calva, Digi Mart USA News: Four years after his breakthrough with Babylon, Diego Calva, the November digital cover star of A Rabbit’s Foot, talks about finding home in the movies, his relationship with the queer scene, navigating Hollywood, and why he does not fall in love without thinking in the eternal.
Calva is telling a story about the movies. As a young boy growing up in Mexico City, his grandmother, an obsessive cinema-goer, took him to the Cineteca Nacional.
No film was off-limits, from children’s movies and Golden Age Mexican melodramas to sweeping romances and American blockbusters. The subtitles moved so fast, he says, that she would lean in and whisper the translations in his ear.
“My love of movies comes from the excitement of sitting in a movie theater with my grandmother every weekend,” he says. “No one cared if I was seven years old and watching an adult film in Mexico.
That’s how I first watched the horrible Batman movie, Batman & Robin (1997). I was obsessed with Uma Thurman.”
The 34-year-old actor called from transit on his way home from the Morelia Film Festival in Mexico, where he had just received an honorary award celebrating his contributions to Mexican cinema. The festival holds special meaning for Calva, who went from a local skater standing in line outside the ticket booth to premiering his first film, I Promise You Anarchy (2015), there, and now returned with Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, the international indie hit in which he stars.
“I don’t feel like I deserve any kind of career award just yet,” he says. “But it felt great.
It’s a special feeling when your own people recognize your work.”
Cinema has been there for Calva his entire life. As the only child of a single-parent household, he spent long stretches of the day in front of the TV while his mother was at work.
The screen, he says, was his “first nanny.” As a teenager, he would visit a well-known neighborhood DVD dealer, Armando, who, if the price was right, could get you a bootleg of almost any movie from around the world. He watched a new film a day, becoming familiar with Gregg Araki, Harmony Korine, Andrea Arnold, Linklater and Buñuel, which he describes as punk-rock architects of “fucked-up, rotten-beautiful” coming-of-age films that felt like his own teenage years spent skating around the city.
“I was the guy in high school who had seen all the Korean movies. I found the films of Gregg Araki and Harmony Korine and I felt safe in their hands.
I was among weirdos. Normal people scared the shit out of me.”
A broken heart at 15 turned movie-watching into a calling. “My first break-up,” he laughs.
“It was the worst moment in my life up until that point. I watched four Almodóvar films in one night.
I watched The Law of Desire (1987) ten times in a week. I wasn’t just watching movies anymore.
I was falling in love with them. I was a junkie.
I decided then and there that I was going to be a director. I never saw myself as Antonio Banderas.
I wanted to be Almodóvar.”
Calva’s acting career began with a no-show. A directing student and crew member for hire who had tried his hand at everything from coffee boy to sound engineer, he stepped in for a missing actor on a friend’s short film.
A few years later, Julio Hernández Cordón found him on Facebook and cast him in I Promise You Anarchy, a raw tale of two skaters caught up in Mexico City’s black-market blood trade. Soon he had a handful of indie films and a role in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, but he had not yet called himself an actor.
“A few years later,” Calva adds. “This guy called Damien Chazelle called.”
Broke and isolated in his small Mexico City apartment, with only his two dogs for company and the script for Babylon (2022) in his lap, Calva became absorbed in the role of Manny, a bright-eyed Mexican kid making his way through Old Hollywood. “It was the most beautiful thing I had ever read about movies.
I was studying it for fun. That script saved me during COVID.”
Then the phone stopped ringing, and for two months there was radio silence. “I thought, ‘this is going to Diego Luna,'” he jokes.
It did not. Soon Calva was on a plane to Los Angeles to star opposite Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in a major Hollywood film about making movies.
“I was in love with the movies, and after Babylon, the movies finally loved me back.”
Although Babylon earned Calva a Golden Globe nomination and has since developed a cult following, it was a box-office disappointment on release, judged by many to be pretentious and overstuffed. Calva says Chazelle absorbed much of the criticism.
“Damien protected me when Babylon bombed. He kept all the negativity for himself.
He told me that the situation with the movie wasn’t my fault, and ordered me to enjoy the moment. Don’t read the reviews, don’t listen to the critics.
If Paramount lost 100 million dollars, it’s their fault, not yours. He saved me from having to ask myself questions like, ‘is the world really ready for a Mexican lead?’ Babylon was my acting school.
I hurt more, I suffered more, I cried more, but I smiled more than I ever had in my life. I went to Los Angeles, I lived in my car, the whole Hollywood experience.
I still struggle with industry ideas like awards and critics. I know I need to flirt with them on some level, but I take everything as a win.”
Calva describes his life as full of love affairs: with movies, with Mexico City, with his craft and with love itself. He recalls asking the owner of a local toy store to let him rent it for an evening and use the rooftop for a first date, complete with a candlelit dinner and a hired musician.
“I’m not with that girl anymore,” he admits. “But I’m still that guy.
I believe in love being eternal. That’s how I am.
I like to do the most stupid, big, beautiful acts of love. Every day is a movie.
I’m a complete romantic.”
He reflects on a Babylon scene in which Manny, overcome with adoration, confesses his love to Margot Robbie’s Nellie. “Te amo, te amo, te amo, te amo!” “That wasn’t scripted,” he says.
“It was me breaking. I was saying what I really wanted to say to Margot.
It has the texture of someone in love, and you can access that with tricks and strategy, but if you are brave enough to play with the essence of love, then you can really find something beautiful. It’s why I always pick characters that are in love or play with love in some way.”
Calva frequently takes on queer roles. In I Promise You Anarchy, his character Miguel has an on-off sexual relationship with his best friend Johnny (Eduardo Eliseo Martínez).
In 2025 he and fellow heartthrob Jacob Elordi took on a queer romance in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses (2024). This year, in the hit series The Night Manager (2016-2026), Calva takes part in a steamy three-way dance with co-stars Tom Hiddleston and Camila Morrone.
The scene nods to the Mexican classic Y tu mamá también (2001), but Calva rejects the idea that Alfonso Cuarón’s film or any other work shaped his sexual worldview. “I’ve been open with my sexuality since my time in the skate and punk rock scene.
I’ve seen so many colors out there. My best friends would have crazy affairs.
My mom is close to the queer scene. It’s part of who I am, and there was no way for me to be safe in the movie business if I couldn’t show it.
I know a few people who have a person and a persona. That’s okay, but I can’t do that.
I’m going to be Diego Calva ’til I die.”
At this year’s Cannes, Calva appeared in two of the festival’s most talked-about films: Her Private Hell (2026), from cult director Nicolas Winding Refn, who returns after a decade-long absence with a polarizing foray into the neon underworld, and Club Kid, a comedy-drama from actor-director Jordan Firstman in which Calva plays child therapist Oscar, Firstman’s love interest. “Nic is Nic,” Calva says of Winding Refn.
“He doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. Then you have Jordan, who has everything to prove, but with no expectations.
The thing that connects these two guys, a guy doing his first movie and a guy with a legendary filmography, is that they are both free.”
Calva is also starring in an upcoming reimagining of Andrzej Żuławski’s psychological horror Possession, directed by Smile director Parker Finn and due in cinemas next June. “I wouldn’t call it a remake,” he says, keen to reassure fans of the cult original.
“It’s almost a trick to call it Possession.”
Beyond the Hollywood mirage, Calva wants to return to the indie roots he planted with pre-Babylon projects such as I Promise You Anarchy, ColOZio (2020) and Beautiful Losers (2021). “I didn’t find home in Hollywood,” he says.
“I found home in the movies. My romance with indie films is going to last forever.
I want my old schoolmates to send me their scripts, I want to be a part of their movies. If my small slice of fame can help find the money to get a movie made, then I’m happy.”
He also suggests a desire to reclaim his coming-of-age story. “The thing with acting as a teenager is that you can use your immaturity as a tool in your performance.
Now I’m so aware of acting that sometimes I feel like I’m just doing tricks. My performance in I Promise You Anarchy was shameless.
I didn’t give a fuck [laughs]. I’ve been trying to get back to the shameless Diego that I was when I was younger.”
Still, Calva insists there is a throughline between the punkish, wide-eyed cinephile who accidentally starred in movies and the fully fledged actor now appearing at international film festivals. “Even back then, I think that the actor in me had arrived, but I was wearing a disguise.
I was myself on screen, but I was acting in life. I like to think that I Promise You Anarchy has a relationship with Her Private Hell, which itself has a relationship with Club Kid and The Night Manager.
I like to think that I’m telling my own story too. They aren’t just dreams, they belong in my Diego Calva universe.” He grins.
“I don’t know, I’m still figuring it all out.”
