Attica and Tembi Locke tease their romantic series From Scratch

From Scratch is a love letter. It's a love letter to food. It's a love letter to Italy. And it's a love letter to love itself — and the many forms it can take.

The upcoming Netflix miniseries stars Zoe Saldaña as Amy, a young American who travels to Italy to study art. While there, she meets and falls for a dashing Sicilian chef named Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea), and together, the two strike up a whirlwind romance (while bonding over some very, very good Italian food). The show follows the two lovers as they adopt a daughter, merge their two families, and try to build a life together — only to face Lino's unexpected cancer diagnosis.

It's also a true story. From Scratch is based on the memoir by actress Tembi Locke, who's appeared in everything from Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Eureka and Never Have I Eve r. Amy's on-screen journey parallels her own: She, too, fell in love with a Sicilian chef named Saro, raising a daughter together and ultimately losing him to illness. She chronicled their love story in her 2019 book, and now, she and her sister Attica Locke (a writer and producer known for Empire and Little Fires Everywhere) are collaborating to bring that saga to the screen.

Before From Scratch hits Netflix on Oct. 21, EW spoke to the Locke sisters about adapting Tembi's story and finding fictional inspiration in their real-life family.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When did you start talking about adapting this story for television?

ATTICA LOCKE: I knew my sister had written an amazing book. It was not published yet. But I had happened to work on a show called Little Fires Everywhere, which was a Hello Sunshine show. I had to go into their offices to look at some scripts or something, and Lauren Neustadter, the head of the company said, "Hey, let's sit and talk about some other projects. I've got some books you might like to read. Let's do something else together." She started pitching book ideas and story ideas, and she mentioned one that was about a complicated relationship between a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law. And I went, "Well, I've got a story about that." All of a sudden, I told her how my sister wrote a book. I got so excited and started talking a mile a minute, and I pitched the book from the top all the way through. [Laughs] Lauren was like, "What is happening?" So I called Tembi from the valet and said, "Oops, I might have pitched your whole book to the head of Hello Sunshine. I hope you're okay with that."

TEMBI LOCKE: I was floored and completely unprepared for that phone call. [Laughs] I was like, you have just taken us off a cliff. Here we go! Let's see what's going to happen. But I said, "You know what? We will grow wings and we will fly."

So within a week, they read the manuscript, and we were in their offices talking about how to adapt this not as a film but as a series. It felt as though it had the components, the depth, and the epic-ness that it needed to breathe across many episodes.

Tell me about the process of adaptation. The show changes certain names and biographical details, but this is basically your real-life story, Tembi. How did you want to approach adapting that for the screen?

TEMBI LOCKE: Attica and I, as sisters, sat down and had very early conversations around what we felt our roles could be. I was always asking myself, "What role am I bringing to the adaptation?" I felt that I could bring not just an inside knowledge that no one else had, but I could also bring a kind of heartbeat and an essence of this story that I wanted to remain true in this new art form. Together, we talked about how to do that. Attica [had] her immense experience in television as a writer and producer, therefore we could very clearly sit down both as sisters and producers and talk about the core pillars we needed to put this on screen. Without those pillars, you don't have the show.

ATTICA LOCKE: We gave ourselves a mantra. We wanted our show to go from "eros to agape." We wanted our show to be about all kinds of love. It was going to start with the kind of young, passionate, erotic love, but over time, Amy and Lino were going to grow up and have to deal with all this stuff with the family. We knew we were going to land in Sicily with two women who barely had a shared language, and with a little girl there who's not connected by biology to anybody, but who is their family. Once we had that spine, we knew that everything else could be kind of fictionalized, as long as it didn't take us off that spine. By changing the names of the characters, that allowed them to be of the actual people, but free to move about the cabin in their own kind of way.

Amy is a visual artist, as opposed to an actor [like Tembi]. It allowed us to do stuff like that. We also turned up the drama. Our family, God love 'em, they're hilarious, but they're not nearly as crazy as they come across in the show. [Laughs] So, that was our approach: to have a North star, but let the story evolve.

What made Zoe Saldaña the right person to be the heart of this story?

ATTICA LOCKE: We got a phone call, and Lauren at Hello Sunshine said, "Are you sitting down?" So I sat down, and she told us that Reese [Witherspoon] had dinner with Zoe, and she was sitting across from her, watching the Italian husband that Zoe has sitting next to her, and the two of them were speaking in Italian. Reese had this overwhelming sense of, "Wait a minute. Is this Amy? I think this could be Amy." So, they called us, and we were like, "Oh my God. This could be Amy." She has an Italian husband! So, we started looking closely at her work and we looked at interviews, and we found this kind of heartbeat — this part of her soul that felt like it could inhabit the Amy who is strong, but also tender, funny, and scared. When need be, she can clean toilets to stay in Florence, and when need be, she can dig deep to take care of her husband when he gets ill. We felt that she could represent all of that, and she did beautifully.

This is Amy's story, but it's also a story of family. Specifically, it's the story of your family. For you two as sisters, what was that like to bring your own family relationship to the screen?

ATTICA LOCKE: Fun and nerve-wracking. I mean, I'm still scared to show everybody the series. [Laughs] Our mom has seen the first three episodes, but our mom is not like [the character] Lynn. Lynn is bats---, but hilarious and also vulnerable, but our mom is not that crazy. [Laughs] So it was fun because putting our family on screen is to some degree the same as putting our sense of humor on screen. It was nice to feel like we're seeing our lens on the world. But it had its challenges.

TEMBI LOCKE: One of the things about family and what we hoped to do as storytellers was to show the subtle complexities that are in every family. The kinds of ways that we lift each other, we fall down on each other, we get back up again, we apologize. We wanted to do that lovingly and with levity. But at the end of the day, it's about how family is often an act of choosing, and you choose to show up for people, and they become your family.

ATTICA LOCKE: We wanted Amy and Lino to, in some ways, learn that. They [have] this kind of arc, where they're like, "Forget those other people. It's just us, and that's what matters." But when things get really tough, you need help. You need your family.

One of the things I love about this show is how it depicts food. I love the way the camera lingers on all these amazing dishes, and food is really the heartbeat of this story. How did you want to approach the use of food in the show?

ATTICA LOCKE: I'm going to give this to Tembi. Literally all food went by her eyes for a final check. That was another place where we were like, "We're not half-stepping here with the food!"

TEMBI LOCKE: I mean, if you're making a series that is an homage to your late husband who is an Italian chef, you do seek to get it as close to right as you can. [Laughs] But mainly what we wanted to convey on screen was the sense of food as a love language, first and foremost. Be it as simple as a corn dog or the smoked turkey. Everyone is using food as a love language. I write about this in the book, how the table becomes the centerpiece around which you hash things out. You mend fences. You aspire together. You reveal your deepest vulnerabilities. And it's all playing out over food and over a meal.

So in that way, food is this other character, this sort of Greek chorus that is moving along in the lives of these characters. It's changing depending on who's at the table or who's not at the table. There's that saying: Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. I believe that, and it doesn't necessarily just mean what cuisine you eat. It also means how you eat. Do you eat standing up? Are you eating on the run? Do you sit down with friends? Food defines relationships, so we wanted to communicate that. And also, we wanted to make it pretty and beautifully photographed and lush.

What was great was when the Sicilians came to set, and we were filming the parts that had to do with Sicilian food. They were like, "I'm gonna take some of that home with me." I was like, "I've done my job. I'm out. Mic drop. Lucia just asked to take the eggplant parmigiana home." [Laughs]

ATTICA LOCKE: We also had Pie 'N Burger come to the set one day for the cast and crew. The guy who plays Giacomo, Paride Benassai, and Lucia Sardo, who plays Filomena, they had never had pie. They had apple pie for the first time, and that was so fascinating!

TEMBI LOCKE: We did have a corn dog truck on set one day! That was an homage to Lino and my late husband who loved corn dogs. So, we tried to keep it light and have fun with the food.

I also have to ask about Eugenio Mastrandrea who plays Lino. He's so extraordinary in this, and he's someone American audiences may not be familiar with. Tell me about bringing him into this story.

ATTICA LOCKE: We had a wonderful Italian casting director, Armando Pizzuti. He scoured every part of Italy, and in the very first batch of tapes was Eugenio. I took one look, and I kind of jumped out of my chair. I had to go into the other room, and I started crying because I saw my brother-in-law. I saw some essence of him. I called Tembi, and I said, "You're going to watch some tapes later. I'm going to give you a heads up because there is one in particular that I want you to emotionally prepare yourself for. There's something about his essence that feels familiar and feels like Saro."

TEMBI LOCKE: When I did watch that tape, I knew almost instantly. We keep using the word "essence" because that is something we were looking for with all of the actors. We wanted everyone to bring their take on everything because this is not a biopic approach to storytelling. But we wanted every person to have an essence of the person they were playing. For Eugenio to play Lino, he had to have an essence of Saro. I saw that instantly in the way he was sort of shy but confident, funny but righteous, handsome but really endearing, and sort of earnest. All of that leapt through, and physically, there was this physical resemblance. I watched it, and I kind of lost my breath. I almost had to close my computer because it was so intense.

I thought, well, let me just sit with this. I'm still going to look at a lot of other tapes because as the writer of the book and as the person it's based on, I knew what I said would carry a lot of weight with the team. I wanted to be sure for myself that I wasn't just having an emotional widow's response, but that I was actually having a producer's response. So, I sat on it, and I came back to that tape and watched it again and again, and I always had the same answer. I was like, yep, it's him.

ATTICA LOCKE: He was also so humble and game. He had never been to America before, and he was showing up to suddenly be thrust into this big show with a huge star, and he just rolled with it. Even that felt like Lino and Saro, the idea that "This is an adventure, and I'll figure it out." But he was a find that felt fated.

Tembi, what was it like for you to watch this series, knowing that you lived it? Obviously, this is a dramatization, but I imagine it would be incredibly emotional to watch your life on screen.

TEMBI LOCKE: It was incredibly emotional, no doubt. I think the thing that I still marvel at and maybe will still be unpacking for lifetimes is the grace of being able to do it with my sister. At my side was someone who had witnessed many of those key moments and who could hold me up when it got hard and could laugh with me at the memory of the joy — the joy had, and the joy lost. I went through all those emotions, but I felt as though I were doing it in community. When I wrote the book, I was doing it by myself, alone, at my desk in my house. But on set, I had a troop of hearts come together in service of this story, to lift it on this grand canvas. This was all an act of love.

I imagine that would be so rewarding, having this whole community helping you to tell this story.

TEMBI LOCKE: Yeah, I felt less alone in a strange way because I heard from crew members and from actors, who were like, "I know this moment. I've experienced this moment." What was one woman's singular story is now everybody's story. That's a part of the universality of these big life experiences that we hope viewers will take away. So yes, the given circumstances relate to my story, but really, this is everybody's story about family and food and love.

ATTICA LOCKE: There were just so many little coincidences that felt like there were these angels on the other side. People would come up and say, "This made me think of my dad, who I lost, and this is making me feel something about love and loss in my own life." Everything that Tembi said, I think that is the hope of this series — that you laugh, you cry, your mouth waters over food, but you see some piece of your own life. Even in these Sicilians or in these Black Texans, you see some piece of the human experience that you know and understand.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Make sure to check out EW's Fall TV Preview cover story — as well as all of our 2022 Fall TV Preview content, releasing over 22 days through Sept. 29.

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