'The Night Manager': Diego Calva on Becoming the New Antagonist in Season 2

Stepping into The Night Manager for its second season, Diego Calva is acutely aware of the shadow he is walking into. His character Teddy takes over as the series’ central antagonist, following Hugh Laurie’s formidable turn in the first season, and Calva does not pretend the shoes are anything but large. But he also does not try to replicate what came before. Instead, he looks for his own way in.

“They’re very different characters,” he says, when asked about jumping into the season and whether the role demanded a kind of restraint compared to the emotional sprawl of Babylon. “First of all, Teddy is like the bad guy, you know, and that was the first challenge.” What drew him in, he explains, was the chance to complicate that label. “I felt really attracted to him because it was such an opportunity to humanise a villain and try to put more layers and make it more interesting.”

Calva is conscious of the representational traps built into the role. “I’m Mexican and I was playing a Colombian narco,” he says, “so I knew right away that I had to find the way to make it more fun and more human.” The alternative, he says, was cliché, and that was never an option. Instead, he looked for charm as an entry point. “There’s some kind of parallel between Babylon’s character and Teddy because both have this kind of charm,” he says. “Both have that weapon, like their charm.”

That charm, however, is not meant to comfort. When audiences first encounter Teddy, Calva knows exactly what reaction he wants. “They should be afraid,” he says. “They should be really scared.” This, he points out, is a show built on deception, where truth is unstable and performance is constant. “You never know who’s telling the truth, who is pretending, who’s acting, who has been actually truthful,” he says. For Teddy, that ambiguity comes later.

The dynamic that interested him most, though, was not the obvious one. Playing opposite Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine, Calva leaned into something less expected. “Sexual tension,” he says, without hesitation. Rivalry alone, he felt, would have been predictable. “Between the good guy and the bad guy there’s always rivalry, always a contest,” he says, “But if you put the layer of sexual tension, then it becomes more interesting and you get right away out of the cliché.”

Diego Calva in 'The Night Manager'Prime Video

He is careful to clarify what he means. “Not sexual tension in a romantic way,” he says. Attraction, he suggests, is inseparable from hostility. “There’s always this kind of attraction between your enemies,” he says. “Whoever you dislike, you actually probably love.”

When the conversation turns to the series’ larger relevance, Calva becomes more reflective. The first season of The Night Manager arrived with a sense of urgency, grappling with moral rot and the global arms trade. A decade later, he argues, the world has only caught up to the show’s warnings. “It’s a shame, but it just got way more real,” he says. “We just have to talk about Venezuela when people watch this season.”

What once felt cautionary now feels immediate. “We’re telling something really urgent,” he says. “It’s happening now, in front of our eyes.” For him, that is where the power of the series lies. “The show puts the question,” he says. “Are we doing good? Is this correct?” It is not a comfortable question, and Calva does not frame the season as offering answers. What it offers instead, he suggests, is confrontation. “I think this is going to be really powerful,” he says, “because we are saying something that is going on right now.”