Most people who want to act move to Los Angeles and start auditioning. Diego Esquives moved to Los Angeles and started building an entire production company’s worth of output by himself. The Peruvian actor, director, writer, and producer has spent the last few years quietly stacking credits across every department on a film set, and the pace he’s keeping in 2025 suggests he’s just warming up.
Esquives grew up in Lima and trained at Asociación Cultural Diez Talentos before ever considering a move to the States. His early work in Peruvian theater gave him serious range fast. He appeared in productions of Macbeth and Hamlet and brought “The Creature” to life in a stage production of Frankenstein. Those performances earned him Best Actor nominations at the Luces Awards, and they proved he could handle material that most actors spend entire careers avoiding.
But Esquives wasn’t interested in staying comfortable. He packed up and moved to Los Angeles to study at The American Musical Dramatic Academy, and from there, things shifted. He wasn’t just acting anymore. In 2023, he wrote, produced, and directed his first stage play, The Last Christmas Tree, and directed the short film The Immigrants. That film, about two cousins arguing over the future and what it means to chase a better life as an immigrant, hit the festival circuit with screenings at Indie Film Los Angeles, The Great Film Club, and the Los Angeles Lift-Off Film Festival. It picked up Best Film nominations at both The Americas Film Festival New York and the Wolf Media Festival.
The story behind The Immigrants feels personal for Esquives, and it should. His work is driven by a desire to represent the Latino community on screen, not in some abstract way, but through stories that reflect real choices and real consequences.
His role in Mistakes put him on the other side of those consequences. In the short film, Esquives plays Roman, a powerful underground figure in Los Angeles whose mercenary accidentally kills his sister during a failed mission. It’s a darker turn for him, and the film found its way to the London Film Club as a finalist, along with screenings at The Flight Deck Film Festival and Lift-Off Sessions.
What’s worth noting about Esquives is the volume and variety of work he’s been putting out. His IMDB page lists ten acting credits, four directing credits, four producing credits, and three writing credits. In 2025 alone, he’s attached to Caged Voices, Three Stories, and All Night Long, the latter two of which he also directed, produced, and wrote. He even handled stunt coordination on Mistakes and served as production designer and set decorator on a short called Eve. That kind of do-everything approach isn’t unusual for independent filmmakers, but the consistency of it says something about how seriously he’s building this.
Esquives also brought The Last Christmas Tree and Dreamers to The Brisk Festival in 2024, expanding his theater work alongside his film projects. Right now, he’s working on a new film called International Actor, a title that feels like it’s pulling double duty as both a project name and a personal mission statement.
There’s no shortcut for what Esquives is doing. He left a country where entertainment careers are tough to sustain, landed in one of the most competitive cities on the planet, and started writing his own material because nobody was going to hand him the roles he wanted. For aspiring artists coming from similar backgrounds, that’s the part worth paying attention to.
You can follow his work on Instagram or browse his full credits on IMDb.
