🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

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It was never going to be easy to cast the part of Lino Ortolano in From Scratch. The actor would have to speak English, Italian and Sicilian; be convincing as a romantic lead and as a brilliant chef; and act in scenes involving family trauma and his character’s cancer diagnosis. He’d also have to embody the essence of a beloved man whose life ended far too soon.

Lino is based on Saro, the late husband of Tembi Locke, author of the memoir that inspired the limited series. Tembi also serves as an executive producer of From Scratch alongside her sister, Attica Locke, who was the first to spot Eugenio Mastrandrea.

Tembi tells Tudum how Attica called to give her a “trigger warning” in order to prepare her for Mastrandrea’s audition. She was home watching self-tapes of Italian actors “acting out lines that my late husband said,’’ an uncanny process she describes as “strange and bizarre.” But when she saw Mastrandrea, his physical similarity to Saro, right down to the gestures, took Tembi’s breath away. “That was actually one of my first moments of, ‘Oh, this show is coming together.’ ”

In taking on a role with deep personal resonance for the Locke family, Mastrandrea says,  “I felt responsible to carry the story on my shoulders.” Tembi was particularly appreciative of his willingness to consistently check in and ask questions about Saro. “I think that comes through on-screen,” she says.

Born and raised in Rome, Mastrandrea is a trained theater actor who starred in the RAI series La Fuggitiva. And just as the Lockes felt intuitively drawn to him, he too felt a magical tether to the script that strengthened as he prepared for the four to five auditions it took to land the role. “This is something I haven’t told [the Lockes] before, but I felt a connection when I read the script.”

He describes his instant kinship with Lino lyrically: “It’s strange because it’s a sensation. It’s like explaining the sensation of being cold or warm or being hungry. It’s something that you feel in your body.” That sensation gradually built to something concrete, as Mastrandrea confides. “I put a lot of myself in the building of the character, brick by brick.”

In the series, Mastrandrea’s Sicilian chef falls head over heels in love with Amy Wheeler (Zoe Saldaña), an American art student in Florence based on Tembi Locke. Their romance eventually takes them to Los Angeles to start a life together. Such a large “city with no center,” in Lino’s words, is worlds apart from his exceedingly small hometown of Castelleone on l’isola of Sicily. Even moving to the Italian mainland was an unthinkable departure from his traditional family of farmers.

That feeling of being adrift and lost in the middle of LA was one Mastrandrea understood well. Before filming From Scratch, Mastrandrea had never been to America, let alone Los Angeles. “That giant mass of population, buildings, distances, spending two hours in the traffic to go from one place to another — it was a lot to take in,” he remembers.

“There was a very strange overlap between me and the character,” he says. “A lot of things that were happening to Eugenio being in a Netflix production in Hollywood [were like], ‘Wow. What the fuck is going on here? Let me try and figure this out, OK?’ That was kind of happening to Lino, too.”

One thing that didn’t take much figuring out was Lino’s veneration of traditional Italian meals. Like most Italians, Mastrandrea comes from a family where his nonna, mother, aunts, you name it — everyone in the family is a great cook. “Food is central in my life,” he says. Mastrandrea was an athlete in his youth and stays very active these days as well, so he likes eating, and eating well. While he wouldn’t call himself a chef, he admits that he’s a good cook of traditional Italian recipes. “Carbonara, amatriciana, all the thousands of different Italian sauces we have with any kind of pasta I can make.”

But where his country’s cherished football (or soccer, as we call it stateside) is concerned, he doesn’t feel the same fervor as Lino did. “When I told the crew that I don’t really care about football and that I don’t drink wine, they were like, ‘You’re a strange Italian.’ ”

The scenes in From Scratch that Mastrandrea is perhaps most proud of are his intense moments with Lino’s father, Giacomo (Paride Benassai). At an emotional dinner in Episode 5, Lino confronts his father for not attending his wedding to Amy and demands he show up for him now that he’s sick. The passion — and, eventually, tenderness — the actors display comes from their real-life relationship, Mastrandrea feels. “We’re family,” Mastrandrea says of his on-screen father. It was the older Sicilian actor, in fact, who taught Mastrandrea to speak Sicilian.

Lino Confronts His Father | From Scratch S1E5Two angry men or family?

“I owe him a lot because, in this story, the melting of the two sounds, Sicilian and English, is a central part of the story,” Mastrandrea says. “And building a character is also building the way the character speaks, because the way the character speaks is the way the character thinks. Paride taught me Sicilian and, in a certain way, he taught me Lino.”

Language fostered an immediate rapport between Mastrandrea and Saldaña as well. In addition to speaking Italian, English and now Sicilian, Mastrandrea is fluent in Spanish. “It’s his second language,” Saldaña explains to Tudum. “Obviously, Spanish is my first language, and it’s a language that eases my anxiety [and] makes me feel safe at all times. It was like our comfort language.”

Mastrandrea was grateful for Saldaña, his “Maradona” of a scene partner, who raised his game. He needed great teammates for Lino’s final scenes, in which his cancer takes a turn for the worse and he knows he needs to say goodbye to the love of his life and their young daughter, Idalia (Isla Colbert).

Lino's Love Is An Invisible String | From Scratch S1E7Idalia visits her father one last time.

Although Mastrandrea can’t pinpoint how he began to approach such heartbreaking material, he was glad to lean on the dear friend he’d made in Colbert. “Isla is going to be a star, I swear to God and the universe,” he says. The two would tell stories and cook together off-set, just like their characters did. They still write each other “a lot of messages.”

Mastrandrea’s popularity extended to Tembi’s own daughter, Zoela, who was the inspiration for Idalia. As Tembi remembers it, the actor father and real-life daughter had their own version of a chemistry read during filming. “They met on set one day and she was like, ‘OK, yeah, he’s everything I thought he would be. He’s a nice guy. He’s fun. He’s all the things.’ ” Saro would be proud.

Additional reporting by Ariana Romero.