A24 Is Giving the Hollywood Treatment to Everyone’s Favorite Chef
The legacy of Anthony Bourdain continues to loom large, from memes built upon his unique writing style to a more nuanced conversation about cultures and food. And now, that legacy is getting the A24 treatment.
On Monday, the studio debuted the teaser poster for Tony, their upcoming biopic recounting the life of Bourdain. The poster shows a young Anthony Bourdain (played by The Holdovers‘ scene-stealer Dominic Sessa) with a mop of curly hair and a sullen expression, as other chefs rush around him in the kitchen. The release of the poster also came with confirmation that the first teaser trailer for Tony will be released tomorrow, on Tuesday, May 5th.
To further sell the vibes home, the poster’s tagline is a quote from Bourdain’s 2000 book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly: “I was, to be frank, a spoiled miserable narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
Tony is directed by Matt Johnson, the co-creator and co-star of the mockumentary franchise Nirvana the Band the Show. After Johnson’s work co-starring, co-writing, and directing Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie already charmed so many earlier this year, the idea of him taking on any new project was already going to catch people’s attention. The fact that it’s a biopic of one of the 21st century’s most beloved culinary figures might be the icing on the proverbial cake.
Co-written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, Tony also stars Emilia Jones as Nancy, Tony’s love-interest Emilia Jones as Tony’s love interest Nancy, Rich Sommer as Pierre Bourdain, Stavros Halkias as Dimitri, Leo Woodall as Sal, Antonio Banderas as Ciro, Michael Jibrin as Tyrone, Caroline Portu as Robin, Monica Raymund as Mary, and Dagmara Domińczyk in a currently-unknown role.
What Is the Anthony Bourdain Biopic About?
While the specific plot details of Tony are currently a mystery, the poster and general vibe seem to hint at a story about Bourdain’s early days in Manhattan’s culinary world. The first major turning point of Bourdain’s career arrived in 1999, when an article he wrote about the industry was (through unconventional means) published in The New Yorker. It’s safe to assume that Tony will chronicle the wild chain of events that led to that happening, and it’ll be interesting to see what else it covers from Bourdain’s career from there.
The idea of movies retelling Bourdain’s story has already been… a little prickly. In 2021, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville released Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. The film soon became the subject of one of the first big artificial intelligence controversies in the entertainment industry, after Neville revealed (ironically, to The New Yorker) that he had used AI to recreate Bourdain’s voice in the film. The technology was used to recite writings of Bourdain’s in three separate moments in the film, with Neville arguing at the time that “we can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
The ethics of it all were complicated even further when Ottavia Busia, who is Bourdain’s ex-wife and executor of his estate, revealed that she hadn’t been consulted about the AI use in the film. As she tweeted at the time: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”
So, all things considered, Tony certainly has the potential to bring a Bourdain biopic to life in a more ethical way. We’ll have to see if that ends up being the case once the film debuts this summer.
(featured image: HBO Max)
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