La La Land director Damien Chazelle wanted a face with similarly deep waters for Babylon, his fable of success, excess and slippery morals in 1920s Hollywood. Shuffling through a stack of headshots one day, he found what he was looking for: a pair of eyes as eloquent as any from that halcyon age of movie-making. At the time, Diego Calva was living in an apartment in downtown Mexico City with no inkling he was on the verge of Hollywood stardom.
Calva had never shot an American film, never acted in English and definitely never been chased by 300 extras across the Californian desert with co-stars including llamas, camels, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. That scene from Chazelle's $80 million extravaganza - the filming of a historical epic for which Calva's character has to corral hundreds of Skid Row junkies into medieval battle gear before the magic-hour light seeps away - was his first day on a Hollywood set. Prior to that madcap initiation, Calva had self-taped more than 30 auditions, Zoomed with the director multiple times and finally delivered an explosive read-through with Robbie in Chazelle's back garden that clinched the deal; the director compared their chemistry to Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty's. The morning we meet - Calva in a pale-green sweater, his lucky chain around his neck - the 31-year-old has just been nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Manuel “Manny” Torres, an immigrant dreamer hoping to break into Hollywood. Listed in a category with Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes, Adam Driver and Colin Farrell, Calva has done just that.
“This is one of those stories you never think will happen,” he begins, installed in the still-novel habitat of a five-star Manhattan hotel suite, a perk of his recently upended life that hasn't lessened his humility and easy-going charm. “All the shock and surprise you see on my character's face in those first takes is real. I was literally freaking out.” Babylon straddles the seismic transition to talkies that shifted the grounda sex dungeon, and a parasitic on-set drug dealer (“Reds chill her out, blues keep her skinny”). There is rattlesnake wrestling, alligator wrangling and one hard-to-forget cameo from an elephant.
