Nikki DeLoach and Andrew Walker star in “Curious Caterer: Grilling Season” all-new Signature Mystery premiering Sunday, February 5 (7 p.m.ET/PT), on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. This is the second installment in the network’s new “Curious Caterer” franchise. We at Survived The Shows had the pleasure of chatting with screenwriter John Christian Plummer about his experience in the making of the movie “ Curious Caterer: Grilling Season” and what fans can expect. Check out full interview below!
What’s been the main element in Goldy and Tom’s characters and the movie in general that fascinates you the most and drew you to to create this whole new movie?
JOHN CHRISTIAN PLUMMER: Just to back up, I had written the first one Dying for Chocolate last year, and it was a big success. It introduced the characters to television. I mean, of course these are adapted from novels, but we changed quite a lot from what is in the novels. And I think what I like about the characters is like in a traditional sort of a Golden Age Hollywood way, they’re really opposites as far as people. She’s all about presentation and how things look and she’s incredibly creative and Tom is a cop. I think I wanted to make him totally there. What the thing they have in common is they’re both professionals, exemplary professionals. It’s just that they’re in completely different professions. So then the challenge is how do they then possibly come together in a way that makes sense.
Now there’s solving and again it’s still personal right they live in a small community and everybody knows everybody but I think that the fun challenge for this one was seeing Goldie actually start to really enjoy solving the crime, solving the mystery, solving the puzzle. I think always if you’re going to do a second film or a third film or whatever with the same characters, you should improve it. It should get better and it should be different too. So I think this one is much more fun in a lot of ways. It’s really fast-paced. It has almost a screwball comedy kind of aspect to it, and I think the fun challenge is to see the way Tom, who’s very serious, plays into the comedy of all of that as well.
For all the fans that are looking forward to watching Curious Caterer Mystery: Grilling season, how would you describe the movie if you had just three words?
I would say… fun, smart because I think it is really smart. It requires your intellect to be engaged and this is a hyphenated word: Fast-paced.
What can you tease about the story that we that people can expect from this movie?
So in the first film we meet Marla, who’s Goldie’s friend and helps her with catering. We meet Mason, who’s like a Police officer, who’s whose local Tom, you know, has just moved there. And then, of course, we meet Richard, who’s Goldie’s ex-husband. Those 3 characters are important in the first movie, but in this movie, they’re more important, all three of them. They’re more significant. They all take a jump up along with, of course, Tom and Goldie.
Just like in the first film, there’s something at stake personally. I don’t want to spoil the film. But there’s something really at stake for Goldy. Where this isn’t just a game or an intellectual exercise for her. There is something that becomes very personal for her, solving this mystery. And the other thing I guess I would tease is that we play with time in this one in terms of the way the story is told. I think a really fun way.
What’s been for you the biggest challenge in writing A Curious Caterer Grilling Season?
Probably finding the right balance of all the different competing interests and the personal stuff between Tom and Goldie and how they’re starting to flirt with each other. They clearly like each other, but they also clearly have other issues that are keeping them from going further with that Goldie is a mom. She’s coparenting with her ex-husband and that relationship and the relationship with their daughter, her relationship with Marla and her trying to grow her business. And there are challenges I don’t want to spoil too much, but they’re challenging the movie to her, growing her business.
So it’s balancing all that stuff and then also just balancing it tonally as well between humor and comedy.
There’s a lot of great comedy in the film. I was so delighted to sit down and see the cut and laugh out loud many many times but then also the stakes of it, we wanted to also feel real, grounded – it’s a story about death so we wanted death to matter. We wanted it to count and we wanted it to impact people and hit them hard and so.
You know, you want to balance all and of course then there’s the romance as well and that’s a tone too and you want to hit that right and feel like this is the important part. It’s gotta come from them. It drives me crazy when I’m watching a movie and I feel like ohh, what I’m actually watching is a network executives notes on screen what that can’t ever be. It needs to feel like that that’s coming from these people for real reasons, genuine reasons and why they’re making their choices have to come from who they are not from executive notes.
The interview with John Christian Plummer has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Get a look at the full interview in the video at the top of the article!
Curious Caterer: Grilling Season, written by John Christian Plummer, premieres Feb 5 on Hallmark Movies and Mysteries. Get a preview here below!
Keep following us for more news on Hallmark Channel, Lifetime, GAC Family and more!!
Chiara
Please step by our Facebook page SurvivedtheShows, Instagram page @survivedtheshows and Twitter page @SurvivedShows to keep yourself updated!
