[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
This weekend, Hallmark launches its annual June Passport to Love programming with To Barcelona, With Love, followed next week by To Barcelona, Forever. Earlier this week, I chatted with writer Julie Sherman Wolfe about the films, and next up, stars Alison Sweeney and Ashley Williams talk about jetting off to Spain for a pair of films focused on a newfound friendship. Here’s part one of our conversation.
Sweeney plays American expat Erica, who’s been living in Barcelona and working as a literary translator. Anna is an author stateside, and amid a disastrous book launch she gets word that the translation in Spain has become a bestseller, so she heads to Barcelona to promote it. When Erica’s BFF, bookstore owner Nico (Alejandro Tous), asks her to be Anna’s liaison, two women have an initially awkward start but soon become fast friends in a twist on Cyrano de Bergerac.
As Sherman Wolfe shared in our interview, the idea for the project came from Williams. “It was an idea born of deep insecurity,” she laughs. “I was in an airport and I was in the Hudson News and I was looking at books and then I saw the translations. They were all in different languages. And I thought, you know, if I ever wrote a book, the only way it would ever be successful is if an actually good writer translated it in a different language and changed it. And then I thought it’s kind of a funny idea.” Once she relayed the concept to Sherman Wolfe and recruited Sweeney, they had the pieces and just had to wait for the scheduling to align.
While good ideas often emerge from fun behind the scenes conversations or on-off casual chats at events, like what happened here, Williams acknowledges it also took a leap of faith from the network to let it play out and then put its muscle behind not just one, but two films. “We have to give credit to Hallmark. We came in with this idea this sort of package of Julie and Ali and myself and they decided to go for it,” she explains.
“I’s a really different conceit. Wedding Veil was more sort centered around the romances. And although there is romance in both of these movies, they are centered around the connection between these two women. With Hallmark, it’s always about the story. And I think they really took to that idea. Having two females, it’s really truly a two-hander because the majority of our scenes are together, is really unique in the Hallmark universe. It was really about them seeing the idea and seeing the opportunity here for the fun. I’m really interested in hearing what the fans think.”
In addition to the film being the first shared project for Sweeney and Williams, it was also their first project for Sherman Wolfe and director Ron Oliver (who did a similar friendship-themed multi-film project with The Groomsen trilogy). Sweeney loved the way he framed the scenes to maximize both of the actresses. “There are so many aspects to this new concept for Hallmark that I hadn’t really thought about. There are so many moments where he wanted both of us on screen at the same time,” she recalls.
“That whole first sequence that takes place in the cafe outside of the bookstore, he has us sitting next to each other so that he could be on the two-shot of the two of us both reacting in different ways to things. And he would say, ‘Cut,’ and the crew was just laughing so hard because we each have such opposite points of view at the beginning of the movie and our response in the scene is so different.”
“You could watch the whole movie, from Anna’s point of view, or from Erica’s point of view, and get a different ride along the way. And it was just so clever of Ron to recognize that if you have both of us together in the movie, you wanna make sure you take advantage of that and use it as much as you can. The fact that we get to be together so often was just such a fun, fun adventure. You can see it come through how we really felt in the scenes.”
Sweeney and Williams also took time during the filming to record seven podcast episodes, which are running now wherever you get your podcasts, and they emerged from their shared rides from set back to their hotels each night. “Ali asked me if I wanted to do a podcast and I said, no,” Williams laughs. “And now we have seven episodes.”
“Honestly, it was our script supervisor who’s amazing and has worked with Ali a ton who had this idea for us to do a podcast. And I just thought, ‘This is crazy. We’re trying to do too much in the middle of doing these movies. And Ali said, ‘Alright, I’ll take care of all the technical aspects. You just have to show up.’ And I said ‘Deal.’
“We were sort of already having that conversation at the end of the day when we would drive back from locations where we were filming, we’re in this big van together and just talking about how it went and what happened and sort of reliving from our two different perspective the conversations we had and the behind the scenes aspect of it,” adds Sweeney.
“And [other people in the van commented] that they didn’t think of [things] from that point of view. A lot of that stuff just was interesting to people. And so we found ourselves saying, ‘Well we can have this conversation and record it and maybe the Hallmark audience would love to hear the story.”
To Barcelona, With Love premieres Saturday, June 7th, on Hallmark Channel followed the next Saturday by To Barcelona, Forever on June 14th. Both will also stream live on various outlets, and be available on Hallmark+ the day after they air. Here’s a sneak peek! And check back next week for part 2 of our chat before the premiere of the second film.
Photos courtesy Manu Sevillano/Hallmark Media. Videos courtesy of Hallmark Media.
