Vince Vaughn opens a restaurant with Italian grandmas

For married filmmaking duo Stephen Chbosky and Liz Maccie, their upcoming project, Nonnas, was written in the stars.

The dramedy tells the true story of Jody “Joe” Scaravella (played by Vince Vaughn), an MTA employee stuck in a dead-end job who turns to generations-old Italian recipes after he loses his beloved mother, who, along with his late grandmother, cultivated his love of food as a young boy. With help from his best friend Bruno (Joe Manganiello), Joe uses the money from his mother’s inheritance to open up a local Italian joint, Enoteca Maria, to honor her memory, but with a twist: He’ll only staff grandmothers — “nonnas,” in Italian — to cook up nostalgic recipes.

Before Maccie was hired to write the script, she and Chbosky, who found themselves on the East Coast, made the impromptu decision to stop by the establishment on Staten Island. “I said to Steve, ‘Let’s go. But don’t say that I’m up for the job,’” Maccie recalls to Entertainment Weekly in a joint interview with her husband, who directed the feature. “It was the greatest experience. These grandmothers, they come over and talk to you, and Joe was incredible. Then we get the bill and it’s cash only.” It came out to an even $100, which was precisely all they had. “I was like, ‘Steve, what am I going to do? If I get this job, then I’m the jerk that didn’t tip the waitress. What are we going to do?’”

Maccie, who grew up in an Italian American family, then remembered a crisp $20 — taken out of her late mother’s wallet over a decade ago on the day she died, as a sentimental keepsake — in her wallet. “I had run out of gas one time— I would not spend that money.” But there she was, inside Enoteca Maria, “And I just heard her go, ‘Let it go, put it down. You will get this job and you can write this for me,’” an emotional Maccie recalls. “I said, ‘Okay, mom, we’re going to do this together.’ I put her $20 down and got the call the next day that I got the job.”

Nonnas is rooted in family. While mourning the loss of his own, Joe finds a new chosen family in the form of the nonnas. “I really enjoyed the connection of food and family [and] the idea that love and culture was passed down through food and get-togethers, and that those gifts stay with us always,” Vaughn tells EW about his involvement. Naturally, making Nonnas was very much a family affair — though unintentionally so. “When Liz got the job, there was another director attached,” Chbosky shares. “But the minute I heard the idea, and knowing what Liz was going to bring to it, I said, ‘If he ever backs out, please tell your producers I want to do it,’” As luck would have it, the cosmos once again aligned. “What the real Joe did was a love letter to his mom, and what Liz did was a love letter to her family, and me directing it was my love letter to Liz,” Chbosky says.

The nonnas are the beating hearts of the film, the creamy ricotta-cheese fillings inside cannolis: Joe hires four disparate but formidable ones to cook up love on a plate: Roberta (Lorraine Bracco), Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro), Teresa (Talia Shire), and Gia (Susan Sarandon). Talk about “an embarrassment of riches,” Chbosky quips. Casting, he says, “was a process of saying, ‘Please, God?’ and then they said yes,” he says, still flummoxed that he landed Hollywood royalty.

“I mean, what a murderer’s row of great Italian American actresses,” Manganiello, who plays Vaughn’s supportive but apprehensive on-screen best friend, marvels. On set, he recalls “talking to Susan about Bull Durham, to Lorraine about Goodfellas and The Sopranos, Talia telling stories about The Godfather and Rocky, and Brenda telling Midnight Cowboy stories. It was the best.”

But for most of the nonnas, Nonnas was personal. “It was moving,” Bracco says of the script. “I cried, I laughed. I don’t think you can ask for more out of a script.” Bracco, who grew up with an Italian father and English mother, has vivid childhood memories of eating crumpets and meatballs. “My growing up was very convoluted.” She also owns a 200-year-old home in Sicily that she bought for one euro — yes, one euro — and famously documented the renovation process for HGTV. “I get to go about three times a year,” she says. “My favorite time is olive picking season. I make my own olive oil. It’s just a way of life that is delicious.”

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“I’ve never had such a good time with a film,” Vaccaro adds of playing Antonella. “I call it my Jimmy Stewart movie. There were moments where you went, oh my gosh, is that really happening? It was really charming.” The star has a particularly special connection to the material: Her late father, Mario, owned a popular Italian restaurant, Mario’s Restaurant, in Dallas during the 1940s. An attorney from New York, he became a restaurateur in the Lone Star State after he struggled to find substantial work as a lawyer. “My mother was the hostess and he was the chef,” Vaccaro recalls. “Jimmy Durante came, Nat King Cole came. It was quite a time then.”

Manganiello, whose own nonna hails from Sicily, says it was meaningful to pay homage to his Italian roots. “I’m of mixed ancestry, so I haven’t been cast as Italian a lot in my life,” says the star, who was recently granted Italian citizenship in 2022. “There were little nuanced, funny things about being Italian that I felt like I understood.” The True Blood alum has fond memories of summer road trips with his parents, driving from Pittsburgh to Boston and gathering around the table with family for big Italian meals. “There’s a lot of sense memory when it comes to the food and the behaviors and the conversations,” he says.

What Chbosky and Maccie hope folks divulge from the movie is just that: “Come to the table and break bread and have a conversation that [leads] to more fundamental respect, more love, more sense of connection to each other,” says Chbosky. Adds Maccie, “You can find family anywhere. Family doesn’t mean the family you were born to, but family is our neighbor, the person that you pass on the street. Being there for each other, especially now — I hope the film inspires people to do that.”

No reservations necessary: Nonna arrives May 9 on Netflix.