🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

At first, From Scratch feels like a dream. Series protagonist Amahle “Amy” Wheeler (Zoe Saldaña) is swept off her feet by gorgeous Sicilian chef Lino Ortolano (Eugenio Mastrandrea), then sweeps him right back and brings him from Florence to Los Angeles, where the two build a life together. Then reality sets in, hard, when Lino is diagnosed with a rare soft tissue cancer called leiomyosarcoma. By Episode 7, “Between the Fire and the Pan”, viewers will want to keep the Kleenex by the remote as Lino succumbs to his illness. 

“It wasn’t an easy set,” Saldaña tells Tudum. “We were dealing with a very fragile subject matter, and our leaders were the personal recipients of this experience.” 

As voracious readers may know, From Scratch is based on a memoir of the same name by Tembi Locke. The author serves as From Scratch’s co-creator and executive producer, along with her showrunner sister Attica Locke. Amy suffers the same loss that Locke experienced (though Locke has remarried in recent years). At the close of Episode 7, Amy lies in bed with an ailing Lino until he takes his final breath, dying on a rainy night reminiscent of the couple’s courtship in Florence. Amy has lost the love of her life forever. It’s a devastating journey, one Saldaña traveled on with support from her producers and co-stars. 

Like Lino is for Amy, Mastrandrea was a rock during filming. The Italian actor speaks Spanish — Dominican American Saldaña’s first language — and the on-screen pair used it as their “comfort language” together. “He’s very giving,” Saldaña says. “Obviously because of the fragility of the subject, there weren’t light days. [There were] very challenging days.”  She appreciated the fact that, off camera, Mastrandrea is “very, very funny.” 

Aaron Epstein/Netflix 

In fact, Saldaña credits her entire fictional family, including Keith David, Danielle Deadwyler, Kellita Smith and Judith Scott for getting her through From Scratch’s most intense feelings. “I just don’t know how I would’ve done it [without them],” she says. “We really came together as a family, as a cast, first and foremost to hold space for the Lockes. And then to save a little bit of grace and space for ourselves, because we knew that we needed it.”  

While the Lockes experienced understandable “human moments” while producing a series based on their real-life grief, Saldaña still lauds the sisters for their “instrumental” support. “There were certain emotional moments that, either because I haven’t experienced them as an adult or because I did experience them as a child — and due to trauma, shut down certain departments within me — I was unable to channel myself,” Saldaña continues. “And Tembi was monumental in helping us all get there.” 

As an actor who relies on her senses to ground her characters — “I taste it, I see it, I hear it, I feel it. And always with an open heart,” she says — Saldaña took particular solace in specific memories that Tembi described. “She helped by placing us in a moment, by sharing a detail of what we were wearing, or of how cold the room was [in real life], or if something came up that really stood out for her,” she says. “Those moments would transport us to a place that we tried to the best of our abilities to interpret.” 

While Saldaña has tackled every kind of project, from a Drake music video to animated kids movies, she is best known for her work as an action hero. She has guarded the Galaxy as green-skinned Gamora, tried to save the Na’vi as Avatar’s Neytiri and even battled time baddies in The Adam Project. The heartbreaking From Scratch is a different, and welcomed, flavor profile for her, something producer Reese Witherspoon, for one, appreciates. 

“What I loved the most was seeing Zoe be this contemporary character,” Witherspoon tells Tudum. “We’ve seen her do so much work where she’s from other worlds and other planets, but this is just very grounded, very based in modern times [with] modern attitudes.” 

Today, over a year after production, Saldaña is still proud of how present she felt bringing Amy’s grief to life. “I worked really hard on this show, and I just hope that audiences are able to take away things that we give them,” she concludes. “Whether it’s a sigh of release, relief, visibility, peace, closure or joy. That to me is what really, really matters.” 

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