It’s a crisp December afternoon in north London, and Diego Calva is thinking back to the night his mum threw shapes with Leonardo DiCaprio at the 2023 Golden Globes. The 33-year-old Mexican actor – wearing a white T-shirt, silver chain, hooped earrings – was up for Best Actor (Musical/Comedy) for Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s sprawling epic about Hollywood’s transition from silent films to talkies. He was the sole newcomer in the category, alongside Daniel Craig, Adam Driver, Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes. What stuck with him, though, was how surreal it was to see his mother not only “dancing with Leonardo” but also “sharing a conversation with Quentin Tarantino”.

He pauses. “She’s been having a great time, and I hope she feels the same way that I do – like I want to be awake more than sleep, you know?” That last bit isn’t a throwaway. It’s a callback to something he said upon* Babylon*’s release: that for the first time in his life, he preferred his waking life to the blank expanse of night. Before Hollywood, there had been darker days. Depression lingered. Now, sitting in a film studio promoting The Night Manager, he fizzes with enthusiasm, his hazel eyes gleaming. When he speaks, his accent is lilting and mellifluous, each word given its own rhythm and weight.

The BBC series returns nearly a decade after it first appeared, all sun-soaked Mediterranean villas and serpentine plotting. Tom Hiddleston was Jonathan Pine, the former soldier turned luxury hotel night manager turned reluctant spy navigating a world of oligarchs and arms dealers – a performance so debonair that it had everyone convinced he’d be the next James Bond. Adapted by David Farr from a John le Carré novel, it was sleek and sexy: event TV of the highest calibre. It won Baftas, Golden Globes, Emmys. In the new series, Farr expands the story beyond the original book into a plot that takes in betrayals, conspiracy theories, and guerrilla warfare in Colombia. Starring opposite the returning Hiddleston and Olivia Colman, Calva is Teddy Dos Santos, the enigmatic heir apparent to Hugh Laurie’s arms dealer Richard Roper.

Calva locked himself in his house in Mexico for two days to nail down the audition, working through scenes with an actress friend. One exchange had to plumb emotion. “And the other one I had to look dangerous and mysterious,” he says. They recorded 30 or 40 tapes. His performance is exceptional: an impeccably tailored study in stillness and sleepy-eyed sophistication, with menace pooling just beneath the surface. “Sometimes that kind of silence is way more threatening,” says Calva.

His assurance in the role sometimes deserts him in real life. “I’m afraid in a lot of situations – press, doing this interview, a dinner later – but when I’m shooting, when I’m acting, I’m free.” That freedom, he says, depends entirely on the right conditions being cultivated on set. His collaboration with *I Hate Suzie *director Georgi Banks-Davies, who took over from Susanne Bier for the sequel, was key. “As an actor, it’s really important to feel safe... to play, to explore, to be curious,” Calva says. “Teddy is Georgi’s and Diego’s creation. We created all the layers on the character, but that only came from trust. I will work with her every single day of my life with no problem. This doesn’t happen with every director.”

Impeccably tailored: Calva as Teddy Dos Santos in ‘The Night Manager’ (BBC/Ink Factory)

The same trust developed with Hiddleston. “I’m the rookie,” he says. “Tom’s career is amazing. He’s been doing this for a long time.” Calva describes himself as “a thief” – picking up techniques by watching how others work. But Hiddleston didn’t just let the younger actor observe from the sidelines. They went to dinners, hung out between takes, built genuine rapport. “There’s a captain in every team,” Calva explains, using a football metaphor. “The technical director was Georgi, but on the field, the captain was Tom. If you’re selfish, the team is not going to win.”

In Mexico, as a teenager, Calva was first exposed to the BBC not through television, but through Radio 1’s Essential Mix. A big fan of electronic music, he namechecks the programme’s host, the veteran superstar DJ Pete Tong – not exactly the most obvious introduction to the broadcaster whose flagship New Year’s Day drama he’s leading.

I don’t think that 25 years ago you could name a movie the size of ‘Babylon’ with a Latino actor being the lead

The Night Manager continues a pattern in Calva’s career: morally complex characters operating in shadowy worlds. He was a drug lord in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico; now he’s an arms dealer. Is he concerned about being typecast? “No,” he says, “because when people see this show, they’ll see the writing is so layered. We always focus on the human side of the story. It’s a spy story. Everybody’s lying. You don’t know what’s going to happen. So the only way you can believe a lie is if it’s actually kind of true. We tried to find that human side of every character.”

The industry is changing, he adds, pointing to his breakthrough role. “I don’t think that 25 years ago you could name a movie the size of Babylon, that kind of scale, with a Latino actor being the lead.”

*Babylon *was Chazelle’s three-hour paean to Golden Age Hollywood. Sucked into a gilded bacchanal of sex, drugs and duplicity is Calva’s Manny Torres, the wide-eyed Mexican immigrant clawing his way from elephant-wrangling dogsbody to studio executive. It’s a wonderful performance. Finding genuine pathos beneath the glamorous excess, he’s the film’s warm, watchful centre, his eyes registering every triumph and indignity in turn.

The role changed everything. Chazelle had spotted Calva’s headshot when searching for an unknown to anchor the film. The audition process stretched across 2019 and into the pandemic. Chazelle asked for more tapes and told him to work on his English. “My English was really bad, but like, really, really, really bad,” he tells me. “Past tense? It was just impossible, like the word ‘went’. I just used to say, ‘I go yesterday to the restaurant.’”

Breaking through: Calva with Brad Pitt in ‘Babylon’ (Paramount Pictures)

When he arrived on set, the education began. Like Manny, he suddenly found himself in the orbit of some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, in this case Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. It was hard to not feel intimidated. “You’re thinking that you’re dealing with Pokémon, you know, with gods,” says Calva. “But when you realise you’re dealing with people, right? And they share their stories with you, and you realise that they, at some moment, were in a very similar spot...” The stories helped: “Brad Pitt was working dressed as a chicken for a restaurant,” he notes.

Robbie and her husband Tom Ackerley noticed Calva heading back to his hotel alone, and invited him to move in. They spent evenings cooking, playing cards, going to the beach; Pitt, meanwhile, quietly helped refine Calva’s pronunciation.

Before landing Babylon, Calva had worked across every department on Mexican film sets – sound, editing, production assistance, whatever would get him close to the craft. “Between Manny and me, we kind of share the same path, working as a copy guy, trying so many different jobs, so many different disciplines in movie-making, and then – boom, we made it, right?”

When *Babylon *opened, it divided critics and died at the box office. The response to it doesn’t faze him. “In my opinion, I won,” he says. “Apocalypse Now, Fight Club, just to name two... even Goodfellas... they were flops. I hope, right, there’s this dream, of course, that in 20 years there’s a change of view about Babylon.”

If *Babylon *didn’t exactly conquer the box office, it did turbo-boost Calva’s self-belief. “With time,” he says, “I realised that there’s no imposter syndrome any more.” His most prominent role since came in the unabashed queer romance On Swift Horses, where he played a Las Vegas hustler who becomes the secret lover of Jacob Elordi’s drifter. Calva is no minnow at a smidge over 6ft, but kissing the 6ft 5in Elordi in matching tighty whities gave him neck pain.

There’s one aspect of Manny’s journey in Babylon that he’s determined not to repeat: the way he lies about his Mexican identity. Calva has been careful to maintain his roots. He came from the independent film scene in Mexico, and has made a point of returning. “I’ve been able to work on Mexican productions,” he says. “And now there’s a new value on my name, and I love to use it – for example, when a new filmmaker is going to do their first movie, and to finance the movie, it helps to have a Diego Calva. I’ll sign it. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to make it, because of scheduling or whatever, but I think it’s really important to go back to your country, in my opinion, to act there. If I direct someday, I will definitely pursue going back and doing it in Mexico, with a Mexican production, with Mexican money, with Mexican actors, and a Mexican movie.”

Directing was the original goal. As far back as he can remember, Calva always wanted to be a filmmaker – at least since watching Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. “That was just like, ‘OK, I want to change my life,’” he recalls.

Calva was born in Mexico City and raised as an only child by his mother, who worked in publishing, in their book-filled apartment. For much of his childhood it was just the two of them; the man he considers his father – whose profession he describes as “a thinker... it’s hard to describe” – is not his biological parent. They were a very cultured family, he says. “So maybe if I was a lawyer, that would be weird, but I’m the obvious consequence of my parents.” As well as writing poetry, the young Diego Calva developed an obsession with movies – first Disney, then, after his first girlfriend broke up with him, Pedro Almodóvar’s entire filmography. But it was *Goodfellas *that proved revelatory.

Calva has just finished working on Her Private Hell from Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director behind the neon-drenched thriller Drive. The work keeps coming. As our conversation winds down, Calva still can’t believe his luck. “Since Babylon, I want every day to be 48 hours long because I’m enjoying it so much.” He breaks into a wide smile. “Life is beautiful, man.”

‘The Night Manager’ airs on BBC One on New Year’s Day