The Italian job: ‘I hope to delight everyone,’ says Regé-Jean Page

In the romantic comedy You, Me & Tuscany, there is a scene – well, several actually – where the film’s leading man Regé-Jean Page is required to remove his shirt. At least one involves him being soaking wet. And all of them, in the screening I attended, got a reaction from the audience best described as … enthusiastic.

Though the moment is somehow reminiscent of the scene in Soapdish where Carrie Fisher suggests to an auditioning Costas Mandylor that he “try one without the shirt”, journalistic professionalism requires we meet this artistic choice with a serious inquiry about how Page felt taking his shirt off to the delight of a cinema full of women?

“I don’t know why you’re restricting it to just women, I want to delight everyone in the cinema,” he says, with a wry smile. But, he adds, in a more serious tone, “you’ve struck the key … [which is that] it is about delighting an audience, and there are various tools with which we do that. Some of it is in the text, some of it is physical.

“The way you thread through all of that, you figure out what you are providing the audience, what they’ve come for [and] what is delightful about the genre,” Page adds. “Where you are leaning into fantasy and where you are leaning into reality, I like to think of romcoms in particular as kind of like an Arnold Palmer – sweet and savory – but everything is serving the same thing, and it’s always the audience.”

You, Me & Tuscany opens when Anna (Halle Bailey), a woman drifting through her 20s, encounters by chance a handsome man named Matteo (Lorenzo De Moor), on the run from his restrictive family life in Italy. One glimpse of his empty Italian villa and Anna is off to Italy, hoping to turn a small fib into a chance to live her dream.

The complicating factors? His family discover her, and they are drawn into the lie that she is his fiancée. This is where Matteo’s cousin (and adopted brother) Michael (Page) enters the frame. You see, he’s the town pin-up boy and grape farmer, but Anna is now stuck engaged to an absent fiancé who, frankly, is not yet in on the lie. There are relatives, high drama, chemistry for days and a lot of food. Welcome to Italy.

The film lives in a curious intersection within popular culture: the fantastical Italy, the Instagram fantasy of sun-drenched little villages and vast feasting tables of pasta al forno, parmigiana di melanzane and insalata caprese, and the various made-for-television movies that have turned all of that into a romantic/drama sub-genre. In a parallel universe, this might be My Big Fat Italian Hallmark Movie.

“The joy of this business, of this job, is that we make illusions real,” Page says. “The relationship you’re referring to, between the Instagram Italy and the lived Italy, is precisely which parts of the real world that we lived in, that we experienced. I want to be emphatic about that, it’s to know that it is and can be real.

“You talk about running away from the world, but actually, I think it’s really useful to frame the world in terms of things we are running towards,” Page adds. “That’s a lot more powerful. It is a fantasy. It is fantastical, but it’s a fantasy based on real things that we can create, that we can lean into, that we can choose to capture and centre and put in front of our experience.”

His co-star concurs. “There is a sense of escapism that you go to, like music,” she says. “There’s a place you go, you hear your favourite song, the chills you get, [it’s the same] with movies. We sometimes need to just dive into another world and feel the sense of joy and the rollercoaster of emotions. We need to feel good. It’s nice to feel joyful … that you’re able to go into that world together with people you love.”

What the film does possess, and does capture nicely in the midst of a slightly overwrought Italian experience, is a great sense of the Italian landscape. The film was shot on location in Pienza, in Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia, and the film’s Australian director of photography Danny Ruhlmann does not waste a frame. Indeed, the film lingers on every postcard-adjacent vista it can find.

“We find a lot of that [spirit of place] through food and through family,” Page says. “What I certainly found in Italy, but in Tuscany and Rome particularly where we shot, is that you can’t separate food from people, from landscape, from culture. They are one thing, and they all interact.”

The film’s interiors were shot at Rome’s Cinecittà, the sprawling 99-acre complex which is the artistic and spiritual home of cinema in Italy. Built in the 1930s, it is where the American Italian films of the 1950s and 1960s were shot, including Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) and Cleopatra (1963). It is also the creative home of Italy’s master filmmaker Federico Fellini, who shot many of his films there, including La Dolce Vita (1960).

Bailey says there was a powerful living spirit to the site, energised by its long and rich artistic history. “That spirit was very much alive,” she says. “The artistic energy that you still feel wandering in the air. I was very grateful to be in those spaces where you can feel the energy because you feel it throughout the project that you’re working on, too. It feels like sparkles of good luck. The air is the same.”

Page describes their time at Cinecittà as an opportunity. “You feel the opportunity to step into that history and that narrative and add something to it when you can,” he says.

“I’ve worked on the Paramount lot before, which I didn’t appreciate because I was too young to realise quite how much history was around me,” Page adds.

As far as happily ever after goes, you have to trust that things will work out okay. Matteo and Michael’s mother Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari) is fierce. Their father, Vincenzo (Paolo Sassanelli), is remote, and wounded. And sister Francesca (Stella Pecollo), is enthusiastic about the idea of Anna as an in-law, regardless of which brother she ends up with. (The gift with purchase is the town’s hilarious taxi driver, played by Marco Calvani.)

But there is one slightly peculiar caveat to this love story: it does begin with some questionable choices, notably Anna’s infiltration of Michael’s iPhone. Prospective singles beware: Face ID and AirPlay are clearly nobody’s friend. “A lot of Anna’s choices are questionable, but they’re real,” says Bailey, laughing.

“What makes the movie fun is seeing her trial and error of getting caught up in her web of lies and her messiness and her impulsiveness,” Bailey adds. “It’s also what makes you root for her, too, because I think we all can relate to feeling as though sometimes you have to be a little messy to get places. And she ended up in the right place. She just … took the scenic route.”

So, this really is just an old-fashioned love story? With a side of pasta?

“What else is there?” Page says. “That is the actor’s toolbox. I firmly, firmly believe that every movie is a love story. There are no real character motivations that don’t involve love in some form. It can get twisted. It can be miserable. It can be dark or hard. It can be from trauma, a lack of love. But somewhere in there, people will always be chasing what they love and the need to be loved.”

Bailey concurs. “It’s beautiful to see the beginning of somebody’s sparks together, especially on a film,” she says. “It’s one of my favourite things to watch in a rom-com. Michael and Anna’s first meeting … it was a joy to play and a joy to watch, I hope for audiences to see that. And we all just love a little love.”

You, Me & Tuscany opens in cinemas on April 9.