“I don’t drink alcohol,” Marco Calvani says while scanning a bar menu on a spacious Los Angeles restaurant patio. “Well, I promised myself that I would stay away from alcohol for a couple of months. Can you believe it?” He’s asking because there’s been a lot of partying and socializing as he gears up for the rollout of The Four Seasons—Netflix’s new comedy series cocreated by and starring Tina Fey, and based on Alan Alda’s 1981 film. Calvani spent last fall shooting the series; he spent the winter in upstate New York, working on a new project with his writing partner. He then flew to Brazil to be with his husband, Brazilian actor Marco Pigossi, who was shooting a new film.
“Now we are happily rebuilding a routine,” Calvani says before ordering a mocktail. “I just started going to the gym again. It’s been two weeks. I hired a personal trainer. I’m serious—for two months I know that I’ll be here, so I’m committed.” If you didn’t know any better, it might sound like being in Hollywood is getting to Calvani. The Four Seasons marks his first acting credit in more than a decade, providing what is easily the highest-profile role of his career: He stars alongside industry heavy hitters like Fey, Steve Carell, and Colman Domingo, who plays Calvani’s husband.
But 44-year-old Calvani, who has lived in the US since 2013, doesn’t seem fazed. He’s ebullient in person, as warm and dishy as his Four Seasons character, Claude, who (mostly) maintains a bright smile even as his marriage hits a few rough patches. The performance feels so effortless that you’d never guess that Calvani stepped away from acting long ago. Still, the question remains: How did Calvani—a distinguished international playwright and theater director who just earned raves for his feature film directorial debut, High Tide—get involved with this A-list crowd when he had no plans to act again?
Calvani and Pigossi first met Domingo and his husband, Raúl, at an event for the LGBTQ+ nonprofit Family Equality in 2023. They chatted aimlessly, exchanged numbers, and then ran into each other again later that night at a house party hosted by Natasha Lyonne. That’s where they really hit it off: “We just sat down and we smoked cigarettes and talked and danced,” Calvani says. The couples stayed in touch; the following year, Domingo suddenly asked Calvani to put himself on tape. Domingo had no idea Calvani was a former actor. He did not tell Calvani what the project was either. “I was like, I think Colman needs me for one of his projects with some of his friends—he needs an Italian who brings a plate of lasagna and says something Italian, then ciao,” Calvani says. “Two days later, I read this thing. It felt too big to be true—and too big for me. It sounds awful and awkward to say this now, but if I look back, I was scared.”
But he went for it anyway. Calvani was in Provincetown when he got his official Four Seasons callback. He descended into his producer’s basement to act out scenes for Fey et al. again, and officially landed the part.
He’s spent the last few months thinking about why Domingo asked him to get on this ride in the first place. “I am joyful when I’m with people. If I’m not joyful, if I don’t feel like being positive, I just stay home. I think he and Raúl saw that enthusiasm and joie de vivre, and apparently I was a perfect host and a little bit of a clown too,” Calvani says between sips. “I don’t know if he was conscious of it, but I think Colman also felt that he was getting into a new territory himself, in this type of comedy…. I felt everybody was stretching their own skills.”
Photograph by Jen Rosenstein.
Calvani thought he was done with acting way back in 2000, when he was still living in Florence. He wasn’t getting the greatest offers, to put it mildly, and his goal had always been to make his own stuff anyway. In fact, Calvani only set his sights on acting as a preteen because he’d heard someone say—he can’t remember when or where—that to be a great director, you needed to be a great actor first. “I started acting, and then I completely forgot that I wanted to be a director,” he says.
Theater reminded him. Calvani wrote his first play in 2002, just after turning 20, and became incredibly prolific. He built a theater company. He helmed his fourth play in the mid-2000s, in his first official directorial effort, then started taking on larger productions on both sides of the Atlantic, including a few Neil LaBute plays in New York. In 2017 he made a short movie, The View From Up Here, starring Oscar winner Melissa Leo.
His style of writing is politically charged and dramatically intense, with a strong emotional undercurrent. Until recently, it was not particularly queer. “I didn’t want to be a ‘gay writer.’ I didn’t want to be a ‘gay director.’ I realized that I was getting a lot of internalized homophobia within me,” Calvani says. “I’ve been a gay man all my life and a storyteller for most of it—25 years almost. I never put gay characters at the center of my stories. It never occurred to me to use that platform.” He catches me curiously nodding along. “It’s interesting, right? I think it’s actually crazy.”
