Regé-Jean Page’s London roots give You, Me & Tuscany a hometown angle. Where to watch, where to eat, and why London’s rom-com audience is paying attention.
Regé-Jean Page trained at the Drama Centre London before Netflix found him. That detail matters. The man now starring in Universal’s You, Me & Tuscany alongside Halle Bailey is a Londoner first, a global phenomenon second — and the film he’s headlining reads, from a London seat, less like an American rom-com export than like a hometown story that happens to be set in Italy.
Directed by Kat Coiro and produced by Will Packer, You, Me & Tuscany opened domestically to $8 million in its first weekend and has grossed $11.1 million worldwide as of 14 April. Those are not dominant numbers. But they are the kind of numbers that tell you where London’s rom-com audience is quietly paying attention.
A London Career Takes Its Long Way Home
Page’s path reads like a specific kind of London story. Born in the city to an English father and Zimbabwean mother, raised between continents, trained at the Drama Centre — the same school that produced Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender. He spent years grinding through British television (Waterloo Road, Fresh Meat, the 2016 Roots miniseries) before a single season of a Shonda Rhimes period drama turned him into something the industry hadn’t quite seen. Then he walked away.
What’s striking, from this side of the Atlantic, is that You, Me & Tuscany is the first role since Bridgerton that actually lets Page do what London audiences always suspected he could do. Be romantic. Be funny. Hold a scene without a costume doing the work. Director Kat Coiro gave him Michael — a vineyard-running, wine-shop-operating, shirt-optional leading man — and the result is a performance that feels like it was built for the audience that met him first.
If The Gray Man was the career equivalent of a CIA desk job, this is what happens when someone finally hands him a corkscrew and asks him to smile.
Why Tuscany Reads to London Audiences
There is a specific kind of British food-travel imagination that runs through Under the Tuscan Sun, A Room with a View, and roughly a third of the cookbooks in any Waterstones. Tuscany, to the London reader, is not a foreign country. It is an annexe of the British romantic imagination — a place Britons have been going to eat ribollita, drink Brunello, and rethink their lives for roughly a century.
Coiro clearly understood this. She fought Universal to shoot in Val d’Orcia, the UNESCO-listed region of cypress-lined roads and Brunello di Montalcino vineyards near Pienza, rather than recreate Italy on a soundstage. “There was always the nightmare in the back of my head, they’d be like, ‘OK, you have to shoot this in Atlanta or Bulgaria.’ And I was like, ‘It has to be Tuscany. Because Tuscany is a part of the story,'” she said.
The result is a film where the pecorino tastes like pecorino, the light hits the Val d’Orcia hillsides at the angle that makes the hills look painted, and the vineyard — a 13th-century castle tower on a single family-owned estate — functions as the film’s third lead character.
The London Reception and What Comes After the Cinema
Box office numbers require context. You, Me & Tuscany needs around $45 million globally to reach profitability. An A- CinemaScore and a 79% female audience skew, with 53% aged 18 to 34, suggest the film is finding exactly the viewer it was built for. The question is whether enough of them will find it.
In London specifically, the film’s appeal runs through two audiences that don’t always overlap — the Black British rom-com audience, which has been underserved since Been So Long (2018) and The Kitchen (2023) and is watching Bailey’s transition from The Little Mermaid and The Color Purple with real interest — and the broader London food-and-travel crowd, which has been buying plane tickets to Tuscany on rom-com inspiration since A Room with a View.
If you are going to turn this into a proper night out, the pairing logic is straightforward: dinner before or after, nothing in between, and absolutely no olive-oil-related Instagram posts on the way home.
For a post-screening table, London has no shortage of options. Bocca di Lupo in Soho for regional Italian done properly. Padella at Borough Market for the kind of pasta that makes you understand why Italians are strict about it. Lina Stores — pick a branch — for the cured meats and the fresh pasta counter that reads like a film set on its own. If you want to stay inside the film’s specific register, the Tuscan-adjacent route runs through Locanda Locatelli in Marylebone for the white-tablecloth version, Bancone for the Holborn and Covent Garden handmade pasta move, and Brutto in Clerkenwell for the scrappy, young, Florentine-trattoria energy the film itself trades in.
Order the pici cacio e pepe at Bancone. It is the closest London will get you to the scene you just watched.
What This Film Signals for the Rom-Com Ecosystem
There is a broader stake here, and it is worth naming plainly. Studios largely stopped making mid-budget, original, star-driven romantic comedies for theatrical release over the past decade. Streaming absorbed the genre. You, Me & Tuscany is a $18 million bet that audiences will still leave their homes for one if the location is beautiful enough, the leads are right, and the film trusts the form. Filmmaker Nina Lee has publicly noted that studios are watching the film’s box office before greenlighting similar projects.
For London audiences, that’s not an abstract industry question. It is a direct vote on whether the next Halle Bailey rom-com gets made, whether the next Regé-Jean Page role lets him keep doing the thing he is clearly built to do, and whether the theatrical romantic comedy stays a category at all. The pecorino, in other words, has consequences.
For the full film-geek breakdown — production notes, casting trivia, and the career arc behind Page’s post-Bridgerton decisions — the coverage is at FilmsGoneWild.
FAQ
Is You, Me & Tuscany showing in London cinemas?
The film is in wide theatrical release through Universal, including London. BFI Southbank and Curzon cinema listings will carry current showtimes, alongside major chains. Release windows in the UK typically run 4–8 weeks, so now is the moment.
Where in Tuscany was the film shot?
Principal photography took place in Val d’Orcia, the UNESCO World Heritage landscape near Pienza. Most scenes were filmed on a single family-owned vineyard containing multiple villas, a wine shop, and a 13th-century castle tower. Interiors were built at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, with additional footage along the Amalfi Coast.
Is Regé-Jean Page from London?
Yes. Page was born in London to an English father and Zimbabwean mother, spent his childhood between Africa, Europe, and the United States, and returned to London to train at the Drama Centre London before his film and television career began.
You, Me & Tuscany is the kind of film that rewards the audience that shows up for it. For London viewers, it is also a quiet hometown story — a Drama Centre-trained leading man finally handed the role his career has been building toward. Catch it in cinemas while it’s there. Then book the table.
