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A short anecdote in Patrick Radden Keefe's tribute to Anthony Bourdain in the New Yorker distills the character of the late chef, writer and broadcaster with elegant brevity. Radden Keefe, upon learning they'd both been nominated for a James Beard Award, texted Bourdain to ask if he might see him at the ceremony. Bourdain responded with a one-word explanation of his absence: “Indonesia!”
Such was the seemingly perfect life of the ever-roaming Bourdain. He'd go someplace exotic, try all its best food, talk about it with inimitable passion and poise, and as long as there was a camera rolling he was able to call this racket a job. He wasn't begrudged for this life – there was an acceptance that, through the years of grafting as a chef detailed in his memoir Kitchen Confidential, and his talent for understanding and describing food, Bourdain had earned it. He deserved this life, and he should enjoy it. The world was shocked by reports of his suicide in 2018, but as Radden Keefe's profile of him the year before showed, there was always an undercurrent of darkness running beneath the sun-kissed surface of his life.
This confounding complexity is a puzzle that Dominic Sessa now seems set to try and solve. The Holdovers breakout star's lithe intensity has been earmarked as just the ticket for portraying Bourdain in new biopic Tony. The bar will be high – along with the likes of Boiling Point and The Menu, The Bear has shown how the hand-wringing stress of the culinary world can lend itself to the screen. But Sessa seems to be on an almost vertical career trajectory. He was cast in The Holdovers through the fortune of attending the school it was being filmed at and having started theatre months before after a broken leg forced him out of his preferred extracurricular of hockey. Suddenly he's got Now You See Me 3 and Tow (which he'll co-star in alongside Demi Lovato and Rose Byrne) in his near future. But Tony seems most likely to be the one that cements his place in the upper echelons of Hollywood. What do we know so far?
Star Thrower Entertainment are the production company behind the project. Some of their previous successes include Oscar-nominated works like Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks's The Post and Will Smith's King Richard. A24 Are also rumoured to be interested, so think Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ladybird, Moonlight, Midsommar, Uncut Gems… basically, think cool. It's gonna be cool.
It's looking like Matt Johnson, whose main credential thus far is his direction of an excellent if fairly obscure film about the rise and fall of BlackBerry (the guys who made the first smartphone, not the fruit) called, well… BlackBerry. Check it out.
No it isn't. There was the rather unoriginally-subtitled Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain in 2021, a documentary which received generally positive reviews, but was also criticised for its use of AI to reproduce Bourdain's voice for some audio clips. Little weird. Tony is the first time Bourdain will be getting the feature film treatment.
Given the intensity of latent adoration for Bourdain, which only seems to have increased since his death, one imagines there aren't many lanky men in Hollywood who wouldn't have wanted to play him. And given the number of eyeballs that will be watching Sessa for his next big post-Holdovers project, one imagines there aren't many studios who wouldn't want him on the books of their latest film. It's game meeting game. Let's hope they get the cook right.
