The first trailer for the new Anthony Bourdain biopic, Tony, has dropped and it gives us insight into the late culinary icon’s early years.
Set to arrive in cinemas this August, the new A24 film is directed by Matt Johnson (Blackberry) and stars The Holdovers’ Dominic Sessa in the title role.
It’ll take a deep dive into the early years of the late food icon, and explore how he started out as an aspiring writer before discovering his love for cooking. This, he did by taking a job at a restaurant on Cape Cod over one summer when he was 19.
“I’m actually not a fucking cook,” Sessa excalims in the tense, heated trailer. “I’m a writer. But I said I know how to cook.”
Starring alongside Sessa are Antonio Banderas – playing the chef at the restaurant who helped him find his true calling – as well as Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Dagmara Dominczyk, Rich Sommers and Stavros Halkias.
After being inspired by that summer on Cape Cod, Bourdain went on to establish himself in New York’s culinary scene after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, running the kitchens of prestigious restaurants including One Fifth Avenue.
He shot to global fame in 2000 after releasing the best-selling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly, and two years later ventured into TV for A Cook’s Tour on The Food Network.
He would later join the Travel Channel with Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – which bagged two Emmy Awards and featured high-profile faces including Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme.
His most hit series, Parts Unknown, launched on CNN in 2013 and saw him mixing cooking with travels across the globe.
The beloved American chef and author died by suicide in 2018, aged 61.
His estate have issued a statement saying that they “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,” they continued.
“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.”
Director Matt Johnson previously spoke to Entertainment Weekly about casting Sessa as the lead and cited multiple similarities between the actor and the late culinary giant.
“[They’re] both from Jersey, both sent to private school, but didn’t fit in, both restless and searching,” he explained. “I knew if a scene was working when Dom said, ‘Seems right,’ and I knew it wasn’t when he said, ‘Why would I say this?’
“More than any movie I’ve ever made, this film was a partnership with an actor. He is in every shot of the movie, and carries the entire story on his hunched shoulders.”
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