Dominic Sessa says he was skeptical about playing a teenage Anthony Bourdain in Tony, the forthcoming A24 biopic that is already drawing scrutiny for its audacity. Even so, he says he agreed to take it on because it felt like the right story about the right person.
That matters today because Bourdain is not just another subject for a biopic. He is one of the most admired and magnetic figures of the 21st century, and the film is being watched closely before it even arrives. Sessa, 23, is coming off a breakout turn in The Holdovers and said he spent the next couple of years choosing smaller parts, including Tow and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, rather than trying to become the face of the next project.
He put it plainly. “I was offered these big projects where I’d be number one on the call sheet,” he said. “My priority was: Get on another set, surround yourself with as many great actors as you can, but don’t be the face of the project.” That caution fits the way he approached Tony, where he plays Bourdain as a teenager rather than trying to cover the chef-writer’s entire life in one performance.
The film’s premise helps explain the skepticism around it. Bourdain’s own persona was built on a kind of hard-earned, unsentimental authority, and Tony is not presenting the polished version viewers may remember from Parts Unknown. It reaches back to a younger Bourdain, before the global fame, which changes the project from a simple imitation into a search for how that voice was formed.
Sessa did not hide the unease. “Generally, [there was] that skepticism of, this is a biopic about Anthony Bourdain,” he said. “I feel skeptical about it myself. But for a lot of different reasons it felt like the right story to tell about the right person.” The line reflects the central problem the film has set for itself: how to make a movie about a figure whose appeal rested partly on resisting the kind of packaging biopics usually demand.
There is a small but revealing thread running through that question. In a 2003 episode of A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain sat at the long mahogany bar of Corner Bistro and mused about bar food, asking what anyone was looking for in it before declaring that he wanted it simple, with “blood and grease” on his fingers and chin. That is the Bourdain Tony is reaching for now — not the smooth television operator, but the sharper, hungrier version underneath.
For now, the film’s biggest draw is also its biggest burden. Tony will have to prove that a story about Bourdain can justify the scrutiny that comes with revisiting him, and that Sessa’s younger version can carry more than imitation. The question the project leaves behind is not whether Bourdain mattered. It is whether the film can show what made him matter before the world had already decided.
