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Exclusive: Margot Robbie shares how impressed she is about her co-star Diego Calva’s ability to learn a second language and effortlessly improv.
Margot Robbie explains how awe-struck she has been by her Babylon co-star, Diego Calva, because he was able to improvise with impressive comedic timing all in English, a language he had only recently learned. Calva is from Mexico and has been in a number of movies and series, including Narcos: Mexico, but Babylon is his first major Hollywood film role. Babylon explores late 1920s Hollywood, a wild time in the industry’s history as it transitioned from silent movies to sound films, aka “talkies,” and the larger-than-life raucous partying of the Hollywood elite.
Babylon features a star-studded cast with Calva, Robbie, Brad Pitt, Tobey Maguire, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde, and Jean Smart, portraying characters based on real people of the era. During an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, Robbie shared how impressed she has been with Calva’s ability to learn a second language, English, and improvise using it. She also praises Calva’s comedic timing while thinking and speaking in English. Calva describes working on Babylon as “the greatest experience in my life.”
Diego Calva: I mean, it was the greatest experience in my life; but also, I had to learn English. That was hard, because sometimes I had ideas, you know, for lines and things like that, and I wasn’t fast enough to translate myself into English.
Margot Robbie: Can I just jump in and say – It’s hard to improvise on the spot, take and take again. I was never less than awestruck that Diego could do it in a second language, and he would be funny and witty. (To Diego) You had comedic timing, you’d come up with the most brilliant things in the moment in your second language. I mean, it’s crazy.
The Cast Of Babylon Poured It All Into The Movie
Babylon director Damien Chazelle flew Calva to Los Angeles before production began to learn English and work with a dialect coach in preparation for the role. Calva’s improvisation skills and his passion for the project shine through in the extensive work he put into his role. Babylon is a passion project for Chazelle, with the director first pitching the concept roughly a decade before he wrote the script.
The cast matches Chazelle’s passion, with Calva, Robbie, and Pitt bringing the same energy to their roles. In the same interview, Pitt explains to Screen Rant, “[The huge party on the poster] is all going on at once, and somehow [Chazelle’s] able to capture it all. And this thing moves at a pace that is, again, something I haven’t been a part of. It’s just like keeping up, really.” Babylon captures the adrenaline-fueled pace, the chaos, and the absurdity of this time, which featured very little government oversight and saw the unexpected rise and fall of countless stars.
Playing these larger-than-life characters that are composites of actual people from 1920s Hollywood lends itself to this type of performance, giving Chazelle and the cast the ability to pull specific inspirations from these people to craft someone that demonstrates the truly wild era. Robbie pours everything into playing Nellie LaRoy, balancing her over-the-top reactions with being a real, vulnerable person. Other actors like Calva and Jovan Adepo bring lesser-known Hollywood players from the era into the spotlight. To make Chazelle’s vision of Babylon a reality, the cast had to bring these larger-than-life composites of real people to life through impressive performances.
Babylon is playing exclusively in theaters on December 23.
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