Giada De Laurentiis Talks Love and 'Parallels' Between Her Life and Hallmark Movie 'Always Amore'

For Giada De Laurentiis, the separation between home and work life is not so separate — at least when it comes to her new movie Always Amore.

De Laurentiis is the executive producer for the new film on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, premiering Sunday. It's a project she originally started working on before the COVID-19 pandemic, and one that is very special to her.

"I've always wanted to do this, following in my family's footsteps, especially my grandfather," she tells PEOPLE of her grandfather, Italian filmmaker Dino De Laurentiis.

Always Amore sees restaurant owner Elizabeth (Autumn Reeser) struggle to keep her late husband's Italian eatery running after his passing. It's not till she meets Ben (Tyler Hynes), a restaurant consultant, that she becomes open to necessary changes, and potentially, new love.

"I love the story of a family trying to stay together even with loss, and rooted in family traditions, and of course, in food and love, which are all the things that we all really want to see," says De Laurentiis.

Many of the characters were inspired by the chef's own loved ones.

"The Nonna has a lot of my Aunt Raffy's characteristics," she says. "Since my grandfather passed, she's the one that still holds everybody together and tells us the stories and all that kind of stuff."

"I think there are little bits of each one of my family members in each one of the characters," she adds. "The chef has a lot of my grandfather in him in the way that they're so afraid to change things, that it's so hard to grow, but then yet they do."

A single mom hesitant to meet someone new is also not so foreign a topic to De Laurentiis. The Simply Giada star split from her husband Todd Thompson in 2014 (the two share daughter Jade, 14). De Laurentiis spent a year and a half alone and has been dating TV producer Shane Farley ever since.

"It's going great," she says of their relationship now. "I got lucky that I could find somebody relatively quickly after getting divorced. So, it's so far so good, which is lucky for me because when you're a single mom and you work, it could be tricky to find somebody that can accept that life."

"I got really lucky with him, and he's very supportive, which is also a difficult thing to find later," she continues. "So I consider myself lucky, and I think Elizabeth got lucky too, at the end."

De Laurentiis acknowledges that "there are a lot of parallels" between her life and the film, "which is probably why this movie is so special to me," she says. "But I think a lot of people will connect to it on many different levels, for many different reasons."

"I just hope that people laugh and feel joy and warmth when they watch it because that's what it's really about — and that they learn a little something about food and the Italian culture, and that we're pranksters in the end."

Always Amore premieres Sunday, April 3 at 9/8c on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries.