Young & Restless Fave Hunter King Reveals the Bold Idea She Hasn’t Shared: ‘Not Yet But Soon

When Hunter King was given the script for Hallmark Channel’s Two Scoops of Italy, a part of the network’s Passport to Love movie event, she didn’t hesitate to say yes to the project. A rom-com filmed in a charming, small village in Italy with unlimited gelato? Count her in! She plays Danielle, a talented American chef who has lost her mojo and takes a trip to Europe to drink in the food, the culture, and of course, a bit of romance.

The Young and the Restless alum admits to Soaps.com that she’s “new to cooking,” so on a scale of 1-10, she’s “probably a three” in terms of her skill set. That didn’t matter during filming because she and co-star Michele Rosiello (Giancarlo) got “to learn the process of making gelato” and she did her best to “perfect my knife skills, because I am prone to cuts and to burns very often in the kitchen.” The good news is that she didn’t have to do any on-set cooking. “All I had to worry about doing was placing little garnishes on different dishes,” she laughs. “Oh, okay, I can do this!”

To get her into the mood for portraying a chef, she went straight to the Food Network — but it wasn’t Beat Bobby Flay or Chopped that she looked to for inspiration. It was Guy’s Grocery Games. Yep, Guy Fieri’s grocery store competition series is what King claims to be “the funnest show ever.” She adds, “If I knew how to cook more, I would have so been on that show. I’d be applying right now. Maybe one day.” That’s when she decides on the spot to pitch Hallmark and “spiral this into a good sequel for Two Scoops of Italy featuring Guy and their own Guy’s Grocery Games.” It would be the follow-up film Hallmark never saw coming — an Italian market, Fieri’s signature bleach-blonde spiky ‘do, and the two characters competing on a very American show.

That’s quite an ambitious story, and maybe too over-the-top for Hallmark, but it does lead to a topic that is very right for the network. Does King have any ambition to direct, write, or produce her own Hallmark projects? Plenty of the network’s talent produces their films, and Alison Sweeney recently wrote the script for the latest installment of the Hannah Swensen mystery series, One Bad Apple. Her eyes light up as she reveals, “My boyfriend [Chris Copier] and I… I think we must’ve manifested the idea of Italy. We had just finished writing a script that we want to be like a Hallmark-y kind of script, takes place in Italy.”

Just as their script was completed, she was offered Two Scoops of Italy. Copier visited her in Italy while she was shooting the film, and they used their downtime to location scout and add cultural details to their script. “It definitely gave us some good inspiration when we were there,” she says. “So, it was really fun to dream and let yourself come up with all different scenarios of where you could do different movies for Hallmark.”

Has she pitched her script to Hallmark yet? “Not yet, but soon,” King promises. “We’re in the final stages of making our pitch deck, but hopefully, hopefully, we’ll pitch it to them soon. Keeping everything crossed though.” King not only wants to see her first script come to life, but she’s very realistic about why she wants it set in Italy. King smiles, “I just really want to go back for all the food.” We don’t blame her!

Two Scoops of Italy premieres on Saturday, June 22 at 8 p.m. on the Hallmark Channel.