The Italian Getaway Movie That Might Finally Inspire Your Next Trip

Growing up in Zimbabwe, Page, who rose to fame playing the Duke of Hastings on the global smash-hit Bridgertonwas blissfully out of step with much of the world, relying on a stack of his parents’ VHS tapes from the ’80s, and decade-old state-run TV shows to deliver him the sights and sounds of what lay beyond his grasp. At 10, he pictured himself as an Indiana Jones Jr., happy global explorer, but there were a few problems with that. First, he had a devastating fear of spiders — though he thought that it was probably OK, seeing as Indy was similarly freaked by snakes. (“Cool guys have one crucial weakness,” Page told himself.)

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More crucially, he wasn’t living in Indiana Jones’ world, with large swaths as yet unmapped. “Everyone’s seen everything — the satellites and stuff,” he told the Tinfoil Swans podcast. But the hunger to expand his world remained.

“That started me on the road to wanting to see the world through other people’s eyes, to have experiences like we do in the movies,” Page said. “You still want to travel, you still want to know how people live differently and all the different things they do and eat. It’s the explorer that survived.”

Now that he’s on both sides of the camera as an actor with his own production company, Page feels a responsibility to widen the aperture and “repaint the world more accurately” through the media that he makes. As much as he loved — and still loves — Indiana Jones (and especially Harrison Ford, who he says embodies a “compassionate grump” character onscreen more compellingly than anyone he’s ever seen), he feels dismayed at the formative images he saw as a child. People who looked like him were not given the fullness of portrayal in films, but rather cast as “others” on the fringes or to be feared. Certainly they were not cast as romantic leads.

Though it may seem like a heavy burden to place on a rom-com, Page is hoping that You, Me & Tuscany — out in theaters on April 10 — will lead to something of a joyful revolution. In it, he plays a winemaker, meeting cute over a purloined sandwich with a luminous  Anna (played by Hallie Bailey). Anna for her part is an aspiring chef mired in grief, who makes a rash decision to book a ticket to Italy. Misunderstandings, mischief, and incredibly attractive flirting ensue, naturally — but there’s another element in the alchemy.

“The movie’s subtitle would be ‘serotonin to the world,'” Page says. It’s not just the sun-dappled grape vines, bounteous pasta, and the tomatoes so warm and luscious they practically drip down the screen; it’s the people on it, glowing from within.

“We based a lot of this on Roman Holiday, which centers around a woman taking the revolutionary decision to take time for herself, take control of her life, and travel into somewhere else to discover what she actually wants,” he says. “I think that is a classic rom-com setup. “

Bailey, he believes, is the passport. “She’s so charming and so easy to root for —  the most incredible sense of wonder and adventure. We don’t often get to see aspirational travel imagery with Black women at the center,” he says. “We don’t see it on screen, we don’t see it in cinemas worldwide, we don’t see it pedestaled in a way where everyone gets to live through Halle’s eyes the way that we do in this film.”

And it’s a film he hopes that people will go to theaters to see, because that will prove to studios and distributors that there is genuine appetite for the kind of big, romantic adventure that he wants everyone to experience both onscreen and in lands far away. “Love’s not about keeping it to yourself on the sofa,” he said.

Just make sure you pack a snack and your passport — because who knows when you’re coming back home.