Tony movie: How Dominic Sessa approached playing a young Anthony Bourdain

When Anthony Bourdain died in 2018, his fans felt that loss personally.

Not because they had ever met him but Bourdain had for two decades been so open and colourful in his writings and TV shows that it felt as if you knew him.

He was a rebel and a bon vivant, someone who took great pleasures in things small and large, and didn’t accept the orthodoxy. He could be provocative and soft-mannered, and it was in those seeming contradictions that his authenticity pushed through.

To try and capture Bourdain in a fictionalised retelling of his life, even a small slice of it, was a mighty ambition. To be the actor who stepped in Bourdain’s shows, that takes guts. It could’ve gone so wrong.

Dominic Sessa was a scholarship student at Deerfield Academy when a Hollywood production rolled into campus and held open casting calls. That was for the 2023 Alexander Payne film The Holdovers, a 1970s set comedy-drama about a surly classics teacher (played by Paul Giamatti) and the student he had to babysit over the Christmas break.

With no professional experience, Sessa booked that role and ended up picking up a swag of awards for his performance, including an Independent Spirit gong and a Critic’s Choice.

Since that time, he’s appeared in three features, starring alongside the likes of Rose Byrne, Jesse Eisenberg and Michelle Williams, but has remained an exciting fresh talent. That means when it comes to embodying Bourdain, he’s not bringing the baggage of being too famous.

Bourdain was famous enough, and still looms large in everyone’s cultural consciousness.

Sessa, 23, said he didn’t feel the pressure of the chef, writer and presenter’s legacy until he started making Tony with writer and director Matt Johnson.

“I wasn’t ignorant to his level of fame or how many people respected him,” Sessa told The Nightly. “But I didn’t understand how passionate people really were until I started getting involved in this, and people had really strong reactions to it, understandably.

“Initially, when I had ‘Bourdain biopic’ in my inbox, I was really sceptical of that, but I did trust, along the way, and Matt as well, that we weren’t doing something that was going to totally offend people, hopefully.”

Tony is, technically, a biopic, but it’s not some laboured retelling of all of Bourdain’s life. It cleverly picks a very specific moment, a summer during his university days spent as a dishwasher in Provincetown, a seaside location at the tip of Massachusetts’s Cape Cod.

Bourdain hadn’t publicly recounted those days in great detail – it was a half-chapter in his breakout book, Kitchen Confidential, and a few minutes of recollections in a 2014 episode of Parts Unknown – so that gave Sessa, Johnson and the filmmakers some leeway in how to portray it.

He may have been a lowly dishwasher who spent his days and nights having a great time, cutting loose, drinking, smoking and partying, but it was also a formative time that would eventually lead to Bourdain enrolling in the Culinary Institute of America.

It was in that kitchen at The Flagship that he learnt the rhythms of a kitchen, and the rush of an unpredictable passion.

The primary aim was to take some of those anecdotes about his time in the chaotic kitchen of The Flagship (in his book as The Dreadnaught), and populate that world with characters played by Antonio Banderas (as the chef-owner), Leo Woodall (as Sal, a shifty worker), Stavros Halkias (as another worker) and Emilia Jones (as Nancy, a love interest based on Bourdain’s first wife).

The production experienced some of the madcap kitchen shenanigans that tends to happen around sharp knives, despite all attempts to keep everyone ungrazed.

“I remember people always being afraid of us getting injured, and it still happened a couple of times,” Sessa recalled. “I remember Leo stabbed himself in the hand, shucking oysters, and then I chopped the tip of my thumb off cutting mushrooms, and Emilia and I are doing a scene and I couldn’t get my thumb to stop bleeding.”

Bourdain was in his mid-40s when he published Kitchen Confidential, so for Sessa, it wasn’t about doing an impression of the famous guy people later got to know. It was imagining who that person might have been at 19 years old.

“I wanted to connect with this person on an emotional level first and foremost,” the actor explained. “Because he’s such a transparent person, and so honest in the way he’s reflected on his life and talked about it.

“I never met him, and I didn’t really meet any of his super close friends or family before making this film, so I’ll never be able to connect on that level. I was able to refer to what he wrote and he left behind in his TV shows, but even that was one level removed from what I was having to do in the film.

“I wasn’t playing this 45-year-old man who just sold a best-selling book and is travelling the world and making TV shows, that’s not the guy that I was trying to portray.

“So I really had to connect with the idea of being an impressionable young man, and surround myself with the characters and the circumstances.”

There is more than something of Bourdain in Sessa’s Tony – the ever present curiosity in his eyes, the hunger for something more, a certain chutzpah that masks his uncertainty. Tony at 19 is not confident about his place in the world, but there are hints of the man the world will come to know later.

The film will be released in Australia next week but has already started playing in the US, and so far, the reception has been positive.

The experience of working on the film, of playing Bourdain, of saying yes to a role that would be closely scrutinised, has given Sessa a new fire.

“I’m much more open to taking risks now,” he said. “I can’t really reference anything specifically that he (said), and there are probably a hundred quote of his that would fit.

“But just doing this movie, I found myself in a tough spot and coming out, I don’t know, enlightened in some way, that’s the kind of work I’ve been searching for, and the types of movies that I want to be doing.

“Things that will challenge me in the hardest possible way, because that’s what this was. It was tough at the time, but on the other side of it, I feel like I’m a better person.”

Bourdain’s legacy lives on.

Tony is in cinemas on August 20