[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
Writer Julie Sherman Wolfe has been a Hallmark family staple for the last decade, and in our house, The Birthday Wish is an annual birthday rewatch. She’s brought us films spanning everyday romcoms and friendship stories and last year’s tentpole film, Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story. This month, she’s back on Hallmark Channel with the Alison Sweeney and Ashley Williams pair of premieres, To Barcelona, With Love, and To Barcelona, Forever. It was a treat to catch up with her for a recent Zoom chat.
Sherman Wolfe began her television career writing sitcoms and children’s shows when the 2007 WGA strike afforded her the opportunity to switch gears into full-length screenplays. “Romcoms are my passion, but I never really had a chance to do it. And I wrote two of those and sold them to the studios. And then I got a Lifetime movie about a girl that marries herself called I Me Wed. That was my first one,” she recalls.
“And then it took me many, many years to finally kind of crack the Hallmark code. And I finally got in. Liz Yost, the executive at the time, brought me in and I got very lucky that my first project was Hello, It’s Me, which was a great start. It was a great book I loved, and Kellie Martin was fantastic and that just went well and I kept going and here we are 10 years later.”
Now that she’s a regular for the networks, Sherman Wolfe says projects can vary from a book adaptation to a pitch to a rewrite. The Barcelona movies were born out of the afterparty for A Holiday Spectacular and the Countdown to Christmas kickoff in the fall of 2022, when Wolf joined several of the Hallmark regulars for the first in-person holiday event since the start of the pandemic. “All the Hallmark stars were there, not just the stars of the movie. And I was there obviously because I wrote it, but we were all hanging out and Ashley was there and she brought me over and she said, ‘Okay, I have an idea and I don’t know if this is good, but it’s 1:30 in the morning, and I’m just gonna tell it to you,'” she laughs.
“And I thought it was fantastic and it was a great idea. And I said, ‘Well, we have to figure out what foreign country this would be. And she yells across the bar to Ali Sweeney, ‘Ali, do you speak any foreign languages?’ because they wanted to work together, and she says, ‘Yes, Spanish.'”
“And we’re like, ‘Great, Barcelona. We’re gonna set it in Barcelona.’ And it was really the germ of an idea that came from Ashley. And then it took two and a half years to go from that moment to where we are right now. I took the idea and kind of fleshed it out and made it into a full-length pitch and we pitched it to the network together and then we just had to wait for everyone’s schedules to line up.”
“And that took a long time because there was a strike and those two girls are very busy. But ultimately I’m so happy that they got to work together. And I love that a movie about friendship made it even a stronger friendship between the two actors in real life and all of us. And it’s just been really wonderful to see kind of how that progressed as well.”
While the original concept was for a one and done, the network extended the idea to a second movie and Sherman Wolfe was thrilled. “That was a fun surprise. We just thought it would be one. And I think they just liked the idea of them together and asked if I had any ideas for what a sequel might look like or what a second movie might look like. And I pitched a completely different story,” she explains.
“It’s still Spain. It’s still Barcelona, but it’s just a different kind of Barcelona. It’s more out in the country, has a different pace, but it’s still their friendship and it’s still about them and love and friendship and destiny and all those same things, but it just feels different. And they said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ So they shot them together back to back.”
Similar to Williams’ character, Sherman Wolfe crafted her story virtually and then embraced the city for real when she visited during the shoot. “I did a ton of research. I watched a lot of TikToks and Instagrams from people in bars in Barcelona and tried to make it as authentic as I could. And just like in the movie, I fell in love with the city because I was learning so much about it and writing about it,” she shares.
“But then when I went there, I fell in love with it even more, but in different ways that I never really imagined. It’s hard to picture how it is until you set foot there. I really loved being there and all the different little neighborhoods have such different flavors. I tried to do that as much as I could. They got to shoot in a lot of really cool places. I couldn’t believe that they shot in front of the Sagrada Familia. I just didn’t think we’d be able to do that.”
While the films have a romcom element to them, at their core, they’re about a newfound friendship between two single, adult women who have established lives, and that friendship begins with a white lie that gets out of hand, but thankfully, is revealed and discussed rationally early on. Sherman Wolfe says that was by design.
“We didn’t want it to be a movie about any kind of deceit. It’s about friendship. So we had to get that over with fast. A central thing in my life right now is going from a lot of friends that you’re friendly with versus a couple people that you’re really, really close friends with. And that’s a big transition that we all seem to make at this age. You really are just kind of culling the herd a little bit and deciding which friends you’re gonna really depend on rather than just a giant group,” she points out.
She was additionally thrilled to have Sweeney and Williams tell that specific story. “I love seeing them together. They’re just shining lights of joy. I love watching them work. They’re both brilliant actresses. They’re so good at what they do that they make it look easy. I’m very happy that they’re both in this movie,” she says.
Although we’re seven months past Holiday Touchdown, it’s the gift that keeps on giving and Sherman Wolfe is enjoying the ride. “It’s surreal still even now because the movie has aired and you think it’s over, but it’s not because the Gracies happened and there are a couple other awards that they’ve won and, and we [did an Emmy consideration] event in LA,” she shares.
“I love that it’s still alive in its own way. It’s just been really fun. I’m a 49ers fan, so that was the big irony about writing a movie. But because of the people that I met filming and at the premiere and in Kansas City, which was wonderful, I ended up getting to go on the sideline of a 49ers game. So it worked out pretty well.”
Sherman Wolfe also joined the Hallmarkies on the inaugural Christmas Cruise last winter, and she regularly participates in panels that take a peek behind the curtain of making Hallmark magic. “The highlight of the whole entire year has been being able to do the panels, especially the one on the cruise and talking to the fans. It was neat because they did have questions and they did want to talk to the creative people behind the scenes,” she explains.
“And I love doing Q and As. I get to go back to some of my improv days and think on my feet and it uses a different part of my brain and I love doing them. So I’ll always say yes to any kind of panel or any kind of Q and A. I love talking to people about all this stuff.”
To Barcelona, With Love premieres Saturday, June 7th, on Hallmark Channel followed the next Saturday by To Barcelona, Forever on June 14th. Here’s a sneak peek! And check back this weekend for my chat with Alison Sweeney and Ashley Williams.
Photos courtesy of Julie Sherman Wolfe and Manu Sevillano/Hallmark Media. Videos courtesy of Hallmark Media.
