Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal need a quick phone break.

Luna, 29, speedily pats away on his iPhone. He’s fielding questions for Canana Films, the production company he co-founded with Bernal and co-producer Pablo Cruz.

Bernal, 30, is calling home in the room next door, checking on his newborn.

A lot has changed since the two actors burst on the scene playing sexually charged teenagers in the 2001 breakthrough Spanish language hit Y Tu Mama Tambien.

Since then, they’ve starred in Oscar- nominated movies — Babel for Bernal and Milk for Luna, though Bernal says laughing, “The only Hollywood studio movie I’ve ever done, I did in Spanish.” They’ve also both started families — in 2008 Luna married Camila Sodi, who had his child last August, and Bernal had a baby with girlfriend Dolores Fonzi in January — and share a notorious desire to keep their personal lives private.

“We are completely different now, and we have a very different film in comparison,” says Luna referring to the pair’s latest project, Rudo y Cursi, about two rivaling, soccer-playing brothers from rural Mexico. It’s the first time the two have collaborated on screen together since Y Tu Mama Tambien.

Older, wiser and more experienced, maybe, but as soon as Bernal and Luna settle in on a couch at the Regency Hotel, they fall into an easy, goofy rapport, like recently reunited brothers effortlessly swapping inside jokes after months apart.

“I was going to say … ” starts Bernal.

“I know!” says Luna, cutting him off. The two crack up.

“We’ve known each other since I was a newborn and he was 1 year old,” explains Luna. So everyone who sits with us feels left out.”

That innate connection drove the two to find another on-screen collaboration.

“We wanted badly to work together,” says Luna. There was a necessity that we probably didn’t have [the first time around]; now we know something special happens when we act together. …”

“Our magnetism.” interjects Bernal teasingly before turning a bit more serious. “We got a lot of offers to work together, but we were just very careful about what we picked. [Our partnership] is something that can be exhausted if not done properly.”

So it was only natural the two decided to reunite with their other trusted friend, Carlos Cuarón, who directed Rudo y Cursi and co-wrote Y Tu Mama Tambien with his brother, Alfonso. It’s also natural the friends are readying themselves for the inevitable comparisons between the only two films the pair has ever starred in together.

“If you struggle for people not to compare [the two films], then it’s like not acknowledging an elephant in the room,” says Bernal. “It’s there, and it exists. But once you acknowledge it, then you start to enjoy the movie.”

“Yeah, they compare almost everything I do as an actor with Y Tu Mama Tambien,” adds Luna. “It’s normal. It’s a film that had a huge impact on the audience. I’ve learned to live with it. It’s not like I say in interviews, ‘I don’t talk about my baby and Y Tu Mama Tambien.”

The laughter erupts again.

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