“I hope that people who watch the show take away that being alive is a kind of wondrous thing and don’t lose a second of it,” declares co-creator and showrunner Attica Locke about her hit Netflix limited series “From Scratch.” For our recent webchat she adds, “This experience was quite surreal, but so deeply moving. The fact that it’s so personal is ironically what made the project easier to do and also harder to do, because it was so personal, because I loved so much the people that the story is about. That’s what fueled me to get up every morning to stay up when we had late shoots, and to do all of the hard work and sweat of showrunning this really big show. But it’s also the very thing that made it really hard some days, which meant crying in my trailer,” she reveals. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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In “From Scratch,” Zoe Saldana portrays Amahle “Amy” Wheeler, an American student studying in Florence, Italy, who meets and falls in love with Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea), a Sicilian chef. After Amy and Lino embark on building a life together in Los Angeles, Lino is blindsided by devastating news about his health, which threatens the couple’s future, but ultimately brings their two very different families together. The eight episode limited series was co-created by Locke and her sister Tembi Locke, and is based on Tembi’s true-story memoir “From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily and Finding Home.” The series’ excellent ensemble cast also features Danielle Deadwyler (“Station Eleven,” “Till”) as Amy’s sister Zora (a character loosely based on Locke herself), Judith Scott, Kellita Smith, Keith David, Lucia Sardo, Paride Benassai and Roberta Rigano.
Locke admits that bringing this story to life on–screen has been a transformative experience for her, both as an artist and also on a personal level. “As a creative person and as just a human being, I feel so much stronger. I feel like, wow, if I could manage that and be able to hold my emotions, the emotion of my staff or my crew, if I could see what a scene needed and push aside what happened in real life, because that doesn’t really work for the moment that’s happening on screen. If I can pivot like that, boy, my brain is more elastic than I thought,” she sighs. “I will always take away what’s been affirmed for me about my life that I take from my sister and I take from my late brother-in-law. He really was the one who taught so many of us to really be alive until you’re not anymore. Be alive until the very last moment that you’re not anymore.”
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