Dominic Sessa and Matt Johnson on the set of Tony, a biopic about Anthony Bourdain.Bob Gruenon/Supplied
Given Anthony Bourdain’s predilection for oysters, meatballs and classically prepared Caesar salad (“God does not want you to put chicken in your Caesar”), the late chef and author would no doubt approve of the spread laid out before director Matt Johnson at the Toronto premiere for Tony, the Canadian filmmaker’s new Bourdain biopic. But it wasn’t Bourdain’s love of food that sparked Johnson’s interest in the culinary icon. It was something darker, messier and even a little bit nauseating – perhaps enough to cause the strongest-stomached gourmand to upchuck all those oysters.
In the second chapter of Bourdain’s bestselling 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, the chef recalled his days as a 19-year-old wannabe novelist working as a dishwasher inside a seafood joint in Cape Cod, Mass. During a wedding reception one night, Bourdain spots the head chef having clandestine sex in the alleyway, his newfound lover none other than the blushing bride, her white dress hiked up to her knees. “I knew then, dear reader, for the first time: I wanted to be a chef,” Bourdain wrote.
“So many people have mentioned that part with a grin on their face, like, ‘Isn’t that cool?’” says Johnson, staring warily at the hunks of pancetta in front of him. “But I found that image inverted, almost satanic. Not religiously, but there is something evil about that symbol. I understand the thrill of it, and it speaks to Bourdain’s libertine philosophy. But there’s tragedy in that image, too, and the movie is trying to unpack that. If Anthony was here and we could interrogate him, I have trouble believing that he would say anything other than he hoped to mature past that. It’s something that both Dom and I stuck to.”
Antonio Banderas and Johnson on the set of Tony.Seacia Pavao/Supplied
Dom in this case is Dominic Sessa, the wiry young actor who was plucked from obscurity to land the lead role in the hit 2023 comedy The Holdovers and here plays a teenage Bourdain with the kind of overconfidence that portends either genius or disaster. With Sessa in every single scene, Tony abandons the tropes of a traditional cradle-to-grave biopic to focus solely on the summer of 1975, when Bourdain was introduced to the pleasures and perversions of life in the kitchen. Intimate and intense, Johnson’s film is not about the fame and addiction that Bourdain would one day face, but the wild, confusing contours of a youth in revolt, in which myths are built and broken a dozen times over.
“When we met,” Sessa says, “Matt and I started talking about our paths – how different my life is now from just a few years ago. We started to realize that we both had a lot of similarities in our sentiments toward the world, and those moments of life in transition, discovery. The window into telling this story was realizing that myself, Matt and Anthony all had similar views of the world when we were the same age.”
Sessa and Johnson first connected after the latter was basking in the warm reception to BlackBerry, his 2023 Canadian dramedy charting the rise and fall of the eponymous mobile device. Quickly after that film broke out – winning a record 14 Canadian Screen Awards – Johnson and his Toronto-based production company Zapruder Films were inundated with offers to adapt all manner of semi-biographical screenplays, including the spec script for Tony by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe. Unfamiliar with Bourdain’s career, Johnson didn’t give the project too much attention until March, 2024, when the director and his long-time producer and co-writer Matthew Miller sat down for lunch at New York’s Hotel Chelsea with Sessa, whom they wanted to meet after being impressed with his performance in The Holdovers.
“Within 30 minutes, I was like, ‘Dom, we’re going to make this movie about Anthony Bourdain.’ It was us getting excited about exactly the things you see in the movie,” Johnson recalls. “A young man lying to create status. What’s it like to have all your self-worth tied up in how women see you. The power of homosocial relationships as a developmental tool. And then my job was to bring Bourdain into this conspiracy and read everything that he’d written and go, ‘Okay, let’s see where you agree with us.’”
Sessa, left, with Leo Woodall in Tony. Sessa plays Bourdain as a teenager during the summer of 1975.Seacia Pavao/Supplied
With Sessa onboard, the team – including Star Thrower, the U.S. production company that had been developing the film with Bartels and Howe, and already had the Bourdain estate’s approval – sold the project to hotshot indie studio A24 (Backrooms, Marty Supreme). This marked the first time that Johnson and Miller would produce a film outside the insular Canadian system in which they made all their previous projects, including their other big 2026 release, the riotous comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.
“Every time I make a movie in Canada, I’m putting my neck on the line, our company on the line. The amount of risk is enormous,” Miller says. “This was the first time that we’ve ever made a movie where our producer fees don’t immediately go back into the movie. Nobody talks about it, but that’s how every Canadian movie gets made. So getting to enter that studio system is amazing. But like anything, it comes with a cost. And that is you have less control. They’re going to call the shots, but that’s their prerogative because they paid to make the movie.”
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Part of embracing that new kind of partnership meant that only a handful of Johnson’s frequent behind-the-scenes players – editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, composer/co-star/co-writer Jay McCarrol, visual-effects supervisor Tristan Zerafa – would join him on Tony, and mostly only once filming wrapped. But the director gained an army of new Hollywood partners, including production designer Ryan Warren Smith (The Holdovers) and cinematographer Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another). Together, they brought the bohemian paradise of Provincetown, Mass., circa 1975 to life during a compressed spring 2025 on-location shoot. (The team had to wrap by the Fourth of July weekend, when they’d be priced out by tourists.)
“Maybe this is too personal, but Michael and I cried when we wrapped,” Johnson says. “We became the best of friends and he supported me in everything I did – and I had only talked with him for 25 minutes on a Zoom before we started.”
Crucially, Johnson adds, Bauman helped shape the film’s aesthetic, a departure from the more jittery, guerrilla-like camerawork displayed in the director’s previous features.
“The design in mind was viewers would be flipping through the pages of a book. That’s a huge challenge to conceptualize, because I’m so used to the grammar of documentary. Michael was far and away the most experienced person on our set, and because he believed in me, it gave me so much loft.”
Still, after Johnson spent months in Cape Cod – flying there in March, 2025, immediately after Nirvanna premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Tex., in order to conduct on-the-ground research and dive deeper into the screenplay – the director was thrilled to handle postproduction back home in Toronto.
“When the plane touched down at Pearson, I kissed the ground. A24 was so gracious, and said, ‘You let us know when you want us to see something.’ So I found myself in Toronto with my friends, and it was like, wait a minute, we know how to do this,’” Johnson says.
Indeed, the brain trust of Zapruder Films – cinematographer Jared Raab, producer Matt Greyson, production designer Adam Belanger, actor Ben Petrie, filmmaker Luca Tarantini – are all listed as members of Tony’s “screening committee” in the film’s end credits.
“The real magic was me getting to show them the work. They had no idea what we did over there, but they know everything about me,” Johnson says. “And their feedback was the feedback that made the movie.”
After Bourdain’s real-life stint in Cape Cod, he studied at New York’s Culinary Institute of America, going on to become one of the most influential voices in not only the restaurant world, but pop culture – all without ever forgetting where he got his start. Johnson is arguably staring down a similar path.
The week that Tony opens in Canada, he begins shooting his next feature, a journalism thriller set in Toronto, made with his long-time friends. At the same time, the director is deep into development on a massive adaptation of the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering for Legendary Entertainment, the production company behind Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy. (Incidentally, Johnson is working on the project with a number of Villeneuve’s associates, including storyboard artist and fellow Torontonian Sam Hudecki.)
“I’m about to make this gigantic movie in God knows what country, so there’s a perspective on this movie about Anthony Bourdain that is: I needed to crash-land in the American system and figure it out on the fly there so I didn’t have to do it on Magic, because that would have been a true disaster,” Johnson says.
“Was that my plan? I don’t know. I know when I realized I was putting myself into a system with all strangers in America, if it worked, then I’d likely be making Magic. And if it didn’t, then I’d be making movies with my friends in Toronto for the rest of my life. Either outcome, I was happy with.”
Tony opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver Aug. 14, expanding across the country Aug. 21.