Before landing his lead role in Tina Fey’s Netflix dramedy series “The Four Seasons,” U.S.-based Italian multi-hyphenate Marco Calvani had not acted in over a decade.

Calvani, who was born and raised in the city of Prato, near Florence, trained as an actor in Tuscany when he was a teenager and has appeared in several Italian and international TV shows and films, including Tom Fontana’s series “Borgia” produced by Barry Levinson. But he gradually made the transition to becoming a playwright and film director.

“By the time I wrote my fourth play, I started to direct and I was like, ‘I don’t want to act anymore. It’s great, but everything I’ve learned as an actor, now I want to put it into writing and directing,'” he recalls in an interview with Variety.

His career as a writer-director gained traction in the early...