🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
In September of 2018, Tembi Locke was still immersed in finishing the memoir that would become From Scratch, an emotional book of fairy-tale love and devastating loss following the death of her husband Rosario “Saro” Gullo. Then, her sister Attica Locke, who was working at the time as a co-executive producer and writer on the TV series Little Fires Everywhere, gave her a call… “from the valet stand!” Attica is quick to point out.
“Attica was like, ‘Don’t be mad, but I kind of just pitched your book [as a TV show],’ ” Tembi tells Tudum as they sit side-by-side for their interview. “I was like, ‘What?’ Because literally it was still a manuscript.” Tembi had never imagined producing her story into the kind of series her sister crafted. But Attica’s excitement as “Tembi Locke’s biggest fan” was impossible to tamp down. Now From Scratch was on the radar of Lauren Neustadter, an executive at Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company (which also made Little Fires). “To share it felt very vulnerable, but I wrote [the memoir] from my heart, and this is another moment where I’m just going to take the leap from my heart,” Tembi says.
“I thought, ‘How many times am I going to get a call like this in a lifetime?’ ” she continues. “So I was like, ‘You know what? Attica just pushed us off the cliff. Let’s see if we’re going to sprout wings and fly.’ ”
Soar they did. Within a week, the pair were in the Hello Sunshine offices talking From Scratch. Mere months after the memoir hit bookshelves in April 2020, Marvel superstar Zoe Saldaña signed on to play Amahle “Amy” Wheeler, a fictionalized version of Tembi, in the television adaptation; the Locke sisters were tapped as co-creators, with Attica acting as showrunner. And now From Scratch (the TV show) is out around the globe, following Amy and Lino Ortolano (Eugenio Mastrandrea) through the highest highs and the lowest lows of their decades-long, globetrotting love story. The Lockes think of themselves as “hostesses” of a world they have lovingly re-created for the screen — tears and all.
Over eight episodes, viewers watch Amy and Lino fall in love on the romantic streets of Florence, move to Los Angeles and deal with crises that would shake the foundations of even the sturdiest relationship. As a young man, Lino is diagnosed with a debilitating rare cancer, throwing the newlyweds into years of distress. Tembi’s memoir details her nearly identical journey, but the Lockes are quick to point out that their show isn’t a carbon copy of their lives.
“About 20% of it is hardcore fact,” Attica says. Still, Tembi is emotional as she considers where fact and fiction meet on-screen, adding, “Some places in our series — down to where things are placed on the set and where people are standing — are exact mirror images of what actually happened.”
Swoon-inducing encounters like Lino’s adorable, let’s say, bicycle procurement; the “food seduction” at his Florence restaurant; and his and Amy’s kiss in the rain all fall into this category, the Lockes confirm. Attica’s favorite plucked-from-reality detail is Saro’s endearing love of corn dogs, which Lino passionately shares. “My brother-in-law thought, ‘Look, I don’t know about America, [but] y’all did this thing right,’” she says with a laugh.
But not everything in the drama is out of a romance novel. Tembi reveals that the most heartbreaking scene of the series is also true-to-life, as is the Sicilian Feast of Sant’Anna procession that Amy and her daughter Idalia (Isla Colbert) share in the finale. It’s a melancholy moment filled with a sense of rebirth after immeasurable grief.
Another large chunk of the series is true to the spirit of the book, if not the letter. Sometimes narrative necessity and strict memories didn’t coincide precisely. “So maybe that moment would happen a little bit later in the episode, or maybe it would come in the next episode,” Tembi says. “But we know that the characters need to have traversed this moment somehow.”
Many of the more personal memories Tembi hoped to preserve for herself are a part of that group. “If I wanted to touch on [that kind of experience], we might fictionalize it a hair, because I didn’t want it as an exact recreation,” she explains. “I did propose to Saro. But I didn’t do it in the parking lot in that way with Otis Redding in the background.”
On the subject of Saro — and the casting of his dashing on-screen counterpart, Mastrandrea — the pair share a tender moment. When Attica viewed the Italian actor’s audition tape, she was stunned by the actor’s similarity to her late brother-in-law — so much so, that she called to give Tembi “an emotional, sisterly heads up” that she might find someone particularly striking in the batch of Lino hopefuls. “When I saw [Eugenio’s tape], he took my breath away,” Tembi admits. “Both in his performance and the ways in which there was a physical similarity. There were certain gestures he had [that were reminiscent of Saro].”
Still, Mastrandrea was “put through his paces” in auditioning, including a chemistry read with Saldaña and the all-important meeting with Tembi and Saro’s daughter, Zoela, who inspires Idalia in the series. “Zoela was like, ‘OK, yeah, he’s everything I thought he’d be,’ ” Tembi recalls.
Zoela’s own life is reflected in the finale, in which Amy and Idalia visit Lino’s Sicilian hometown. Tembi supplied the show’s production designers with photos of her daughter and mother-in-law cooking pasta and doing laundry together. Her sister-in-law Franca even ran around Saro’s real-life home village of Aliminusa collecting tablecloths, ceramics, church programs and jars so that the production team could make the Ortolano home feel truly lived in. “Those are actual items from my mother-in-law’s home,” Tembi says. The colors of the walls and floor tile match the Gullo home.
With a story this harrowing, it’s no surprise that feelings ran high on set as reality and Hollywood magic began to blur — especially as Lino’s health worsens toward the end of the series. “We protect each other in all things. So there are parts of Episode 7 I didn’t think Tembi needed to be there for,” Attica says. On those days, Tembi would remain off set, and Attica would communicate her sister’s desires to production. Still, Attica had “one good breakdown” re-creating an ambulance scene that conjured direct corresponding memories of her brother-in-law’s fatal illness. Deep breaths kept her grounded.
But the sisters soldiered on. Massages helped. During a tough day of filming in an empty hospital, Tembi left the set to meditate alone a few floors up. “I didn’t need to actually be there in the trenches seeing it frame by frame,” she says. “There wasn’t a dry eye on set sometimes, and I knew they were all there for my story, for all of our stories.”
The inescapable relatability of From Scratch seems to be what inspired the Lockes to share their most intense experiences with millions of strangers. “Part of what we are doing is saying to a culture — at least American culture, that isn’t always so comfortable with death — that it’s a privilege to walk up to your death in choice,” Attica says. “Everybody doesn’t get that. People get snatched out of life. But to consciously walk up to it with this love and support of family is a gift and privilege.”
After all, Tembi believes discussions about loss are “really disguised conversations” about how we want to live. “So I hope [that] on the other side of From Scratch, the conversations people are having are… Who do I want to mend fences with? What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of loves do I want to have?” After watching From Scratch, it’s impossible to imagine wanting anything less than the love on-screen, heartbreak and all.
