CMU Student Takes on Role of Anthony Bourdain in "Tony" First Trailer
Dominic Sessa burst onto the scene playing opposite Paul Giamatti in the 2023 Alexander Payne film The Holdovers. For his performance as the sullen Angus Tully, Sessa would be awarded the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Breakthrough Performance, as well as a nomination for the British Academy Film Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. While shooting The Holdovers, Sessa was accepted and admitted to the prestigious drama program at Carnegie Mellon University. He completed his freshman year, but is currently on a leave of absence. You would be too if you were cast as the lead in the upcoming A24 Anthony Bourdain biopic, Tony.
Anthony Bourdain was a chef, writer, and documentary travel host. He first became a national name for his best-selling book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. What began as a career in the kitchen transformed into one of travel into the restaurants and homes of people all around the world. Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown were his two beloved travelogue series that emphasized human connection as much as they cared about what was on the plate. Bourdain had unmatched curiosity and compassion for the world around him, finding more value in the hole-in-the-wall restaurants than in the world of white cloth dining.
Tony will cover Anthony’s life (Sessa) long before the days of No Reservations and Parts Unknown. While not much information about the film has been released, A24 recently provided the first trailer. When we meet Anthony, he’s pitching something. He says, “I’m going to walk you through the basic vision. It’s a coming-of-age story.” The trailer shows him reconnecting with a high school crush (Emilia Jones) and getting thrown out of bars on the regular. Broke, Anthony needs a job and finds one in the kitchen of Ciro’s (Antonio Banderas) seafood restaurant. It’s this experience that sends him down the path to become the man we would grow to know and love.
Courtesy of A24
Many biopics fall into the trap of covering too many years of a subject’s life while refusing to be critical of the person at the center. This combination often makes the end result feel like a glossed-over, surface-level highlight reel rather than a piece of intro and retrospection. Tony seems to be tackling one of those problems head-on by focusing on just a few years of Anthony’s life. While Bourdain was alive, he was extremely open about his mental health struggles and the mistakes he’d made, which bodes well for a balanced biopic.
It also certainly helps that director Matt Johnson previously made a biopic that wasn’t weighed down by the tropes of the genre. Johnson’s BlackBerry captured the rise and fall of the company while delving into the heart of the human issues that arose in the cell phone business. Johnson is also known for his humor, most recently seen in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. He co-wrote that script with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe.
Tony is scheduled to be released in August of 2026 by A24.
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