ZOE SALDAÑA

From Scratch (Netflix)

Netflix’s limited series From Scratch, based on the memoir by executive producer Tembi Locke, follows an American woman, Amy (Saldaña), as she studies abroad in Florence. While in Italy, she falls in love with Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea), a chef, who returns to the U.S. with Amy to start a family — only for their happiness to be sidelined by Lino’s cancer diagnosis.

For Saldaña, handling such delicate material required visiting emotional parts of herself. “We had to open up ourselves a lot, to allow the pain that this family endured with this loss [to] enter us, so that we [could] be vessels for it,” she explains. “By doing that, it would open up portals that we thought we had shut in our own personal lives.”

One emotional scene was amplified by the specificity of what Locke wrote in her memoir. “After the loss of her husband, [Amy] needed help with just doing simple things like eating or taking a bath,” Saldaña explains. “Tembi and her sister [showrunner Attica Locke] really wanted it to resemble as closely as possible how it [really] happened. I was in a bathtub, and Judith [Scott], who plays my stepmother, and Kellita [Smith], who plays my mother … were just mothering this child that’s in pain, and it became a very emotional moment.”

Even after the cameras stopped rolling, Saldaña says, the intensity of the moment continued with her scene partners. “We allowed ourselves to surrender to whatever pain resurfaced within us from our own personal lives,” she says. “It was just so special to know that I was being protected and nurtured in a moment when I just couldn’t control myself. That became a very difficult day, but it was the most rewarding day of that shoot because of Kellita and Judith.”