‘Tony’ star says Anthony Bourdain origin story really an ensemble film

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The movie may be called Tony — the teenage moniker of the late chef, author and TV host Anthony Bourdain — but breakout star Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) definitely thought of the film as an ensemble piece.

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Especially since Sessa, 23, was playing an awkward yet rebellious 19-year-old Bourdain opposite scene-stealing actors Antonio Banderas and Leo Woodall (The White Lotus) as his churchgoing Portuguese chef and tattooed, tough kitchen mentor, respectively, at the now-gone Flagship seafood restaurant in 1975-era Provincetown, Mass.

“I think a lot of the very quintessential Bourdain characteristics that people recognize and remember of him, a lot of those elements are in Leo’s character and in Antonio’s character and not necessarily mine (as Bourdain) yet,” said the New Jersey-born Sessa down the line from his New York home recently via Zoom.

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“I’m not the tatted up Bourdain with an earring and stuff but Leo’s got the tattoos. He introduces me to this side of myself. And then you’ve got Antonio. I love footage of Bourdain at (Brasseries) Les Halles (a now gone restaurant in New York) and he’s running the kitchen there and just the overlap of seeing this level of professionalism. That lives so much in Antonio and his performance. As much as I’m playing Tony, everybody is expressing this person in their own way.”

Directed and co-written by Toronto’s Matt Johnson (Blackberry, Nirvanna the Band the Show), Tony is based on the early chapters of Bourdain’s 2000 best seller Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

But that was just a starting-off point, said Sessa who was reportedly Johnson’s only choice to play the scrappy, intelligent, if melancholy Bourdain at 19.

“We couldn’t just base it off that alone, it’s not enough stuff,” said the actor. “(Matt) really collected stories from the ages of 16 into his early 30s and a lot of the mentors around that time. His early experiences working in New York in a kitchen, like all of that stuff, was what really went into this microcosm of Bourdain’s story and this one summer.”

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Just in high school when Bourdain died

Sessa was just a 15-year-old high schooler when Bourdain died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61.

“I’d probably seen him on YouTube and my mom probably watched him on TV but I think after he died he really sort of had a resurgence, especially in my generation,” said Sessa. “Like a lot of people my age in particular started to become interested in him and became curious about him.”

For Sessa, it was early photos of Bourdain that were particularly helpful to his performance.

“Where you see him get older from his late teens into his early 30s, you see such a clear progression of him becoming a man really, and the way he receives a photograph and the way he reacts to someone taking his picture, there’s so much in that. And I think that was for me the trajectory I was trying to consolidate into these few months that the story takes place.”

Fan of Blackberry before he met Tony director Matt Johnson

Sessa says he was a big fan of Johnson’s 2023 film Blackberry before they even met to discuss Tony and then his friend showed him some of the episodes of the mockumentary 2017 TV series, Nirvanna the Band the Show, which was later turned into a 2025 movie, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

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“I was like, this man is a psycho,” joked Sessa. “But we just hit it off instantly. I can’t express how everyday we were so connected. We had each other’s back. We have a really similar sense of humor, I think, which is important. He’s one of my best friends now.”

Sessa said culinary-wise the only things he took away from making Tony was oyster shorthand and restaurant speak, but no real cooking skills.

However, he did appreciate the acting lessons learned opposite Banderas and, earlier, Paul Giamatti in 2023’s The Holdovers.

“I see them as just these legends right? Like super experienced. They’ve done probably close to 100 movies, over that combined,” said the actor.

“But with Paul, and especially with Antonio as well, the level of curiosity that they’re able to maintain at this point in their careers and working with someone like me who has barely done this. And I don’t really know what I’m doing. And Antonio comes up to me and he’s asking me what I think about the scene. That’s what, I think, makes them masters  — their openness. And their ability to connect with someone like me and make me feel good in the scene. That’s the kind of actor I want to be.”

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Tony opens Friday, Aug. 14.

SHUCKING LIKE A PRO

Unlike his Tony co-star Antonio Banderas, who owns several restaurants in his hometown of Malaga, Spain, Dominic Sessa was not a good cook as he prepared to play 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain in the movie about the chef-author’s time as a dishwasher in a Provincetown, Mass., seafood restaurant kitchen circa 1975.

Sessa said had to learn how to shuck oysters alongside Gertrude’s chef Eli Sussman in Brooklyn until achieving his best speed which still paled in comparison to that of co-star Leo Woodall (The White Lotus) who plays another kitchen worker.

“It is very difficult — at least to do it quickly,” said Sessa. “I probably averaged like 45 seconds an oyster but Leo in the movie, you see him flicking those things, like he was a machine. He could do them in like two seconds.”

The catering crew on Tony also had bins of oysters for the actors to practise their shucking.

“Leo — I would find him there going crazy,” said Sessa with a laugh.

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