- Everyone’s favourite celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain, is getting his own A24 biopic, Tony, starring Dominic Sessa, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, and Antonio Banderas.
- The film charts Bourdain’s early life as a 19-year-old, before he became famous, as he learned to cook at a restaurant on Cape Cod.
- Tony is set to arrive in theatres in August this year.
Eight years after his death, Anthony Bourdain is finally getting the silver screen treatment, and if the first trailer is anything to go by, it’s going to be well worth the wait.
A24 has unveiled the first look at Tony, a biographical drama starring Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as a 19-year-old Bourdain. Directed by Matt Johnson and set in 1976, the film follows a young Bourdain who wants to be a writer but takes a summer job at a Cape Cod restaurant, learning under a Brazilian-born restaurateur played by Antonio Banderas.
With Banderas locked in as a strict, but ultimately loving mentor, the rest of the cast includes Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Dagmara Dominczyk, Rich Sommers, and, as something of a wildcard, comedian Stavros Halkias.
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It’s a stacked ensemble for a story that, on paper, covers only a sliver of Bourdain’s life, but that focused restraint will hopefully be the film’s strength as it tells the story of Bourdain’s most formative years.
Rather than cramming decades of a complicated man’s life into two hours, Tony locks in on a single summer that was the moment a restless young man found his calling in the kitchen.
“It’s a story about a young man who’s f–ing up and figuring it out,” Sessa told i-D. “That was incredibly relatable to me, and the main reason I wanted to do it.”
For die-hard Bourdain fans who believe a film like this would have gone against the late chef’s wishes, the Tony biopic does have the blessing of his estate, publishing a statement of support, which reads:
“We chose to support Tony because it is not a standard biopic and doesn’t attempt to summarise a life. Guided by the vision of director Matt Johnson, the film depicts one transformative summer in 1975 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is an interpretation, as that part of Tony’s life will always remain somewhat unknown.”
“We appreciate the portrayal of Tony’s complexity, his intellectual appetite and his conviction – qualities that eventually took him around the globe and endeared him to so many. We hope this film serves as a reminder that every journey has a start, and that audiences see the beginnings of the man who taught us how to be better explorers on our own paths.”
If the final edit carries the same raw, unsentimental energy as its trailer, Tony could be one of this year’s best films. Tony is set to arrive in theatres in August this year.
