Zoe Saldana finds love and loss in new Netflix series ‘From Scratch’

Zoe Saldana says filming her new Netflix series “From Scratch,” stirred up emotions from her own life, ones she thought she had dealt with long ago. Her father died when she was 9-years-old, leaving her mother to care for her and her two sisters as a single mom. “Grief is very deceiving,” she said in a recent interview.

“There’s management of it but no closure.” In “From Scratch,” Saldana plays Amy, an American woman who travels to Italy to study her true passion, which is art. While there, she meets a handsome local chef named Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea. They fall in love and Lino follows her back to the US. Their fairytale, based on actor Tembi Locke’s memoir, is threatened when illness strikes.

“I knew grief from the perspective of a child losing your hero,” said Saldana. “I never understood it from my mom’s perspective, losing a partner, losing the love of her life and having to wrestle with grieving, but also having to welcome joy in your life because you have little co-dependents that need you.”

Locke co-created the series with her sister, Attica Locke, who also served as showrunner and worked with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company on “Little Fires Everywhere.” That connection helped put Tembi Locke’s book in Witherspoon’s hands. Witherspoon was so taken with the book that she acquired the rights and made it an official Reese’s Book Club selection.

She also brought it up to Saldana over dinner. “She said, ‘I just want you to read it. For some reason it made me think of you. I’m excited about this book. ... Read it and give me your thoughts. And if you like it, I think that you would be perfect to play the lead,’” recalled Saldana.

There are details in the series that don’t happen in the book, or that are changed, because the Lockes were mindful they were creating television. “We were very clear about creating a psychic distance, if you will, to be creative storytellers,” Tembi Locke said. “We knew the characters were going to have to do things for the purposes of a narrative on screen that may not have happened in real life.

We wanted the freedom and license to do that.” It was also a blessing for Tembi Locke to have her sister spearheading this project that was so personal and emotional. “She not only was a big voice of encouragement to write the book, but the opportunity to lift the story further and give it a broader global audience was very honouring, quite frankly,” she said.

“It was a very exciting thing creatively to take on, but to do it with my sister, I knew that we could protect the essence of the book.” For her part, Attica Locke doesn’t believe she needed to do much protecting because they were surrounded by a team and crew who respected the weight of the project.

Associated Press