Director Matt Johnson tells EW how he wove fact and fiction in the new film starring Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain.

How real is Tony? Why the Anthony Bourdain origin story doesn’t ‘let facts get in the way of the truth’

Director Matt Johnson tells EW how he wove fact and fiction in the new film starring Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain.

By Mike Miller

Mike Miller

Mike Miller is the executive editor on the movies team at . He previously worked as a writer-reporter for PEOPLE and TMZ.

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August 21, 2026 11:00 a.m. ET

Dominic Sessa in ‘Tony’. Credit:

- *Tony,* directed by Matt Johnson, stars Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain.

- Johnson tells EW the film isn’t meant to be a traditional biopic.

- Instead, it focuses on a short but formative period in his early life that’s described only briefly in his landmark memoir, *Kitchen Confidential.*

No one knew better than Anthony Bourdain not to let facts get in the way of the truth.

His seminal memoir, *Kitchen Confidential*, which rocketed him to fame at 44, is, by his own admission, peppered with myth and hyperbole. And yet, few authors, if any, have captured the spirit of the culinary underworld with such raw honesty and authenticity.

In this way, Matt Johnson’s *Tony* is a fitting tribute to the troubadour chef, whose own legend has only grown since his death by suicide in 2018.

“I wasn’t gonna let facts get in the way of the truth,” the *BlackBerry *director tells ** of his latest film, which stars *The Holdovers’ *Dominic Sessa as an angsty, 19-year-old Bourdain who, on a whim, follows his crush, and eventual wife, Nancy Putkoski (played by Emilia Jones), to Provincetown, Mass., for the summer in 1973.

Cooking without a recipe

Anthony Bourdain (in the striped shirt) with his co-workers from the Flagship and Ciro’s at a Provincetown wedding in 1977.

More of an origin story than standard biopic, *Tony *isn’t concerned with retelling this part of Bourdain’s life exactly as it appears in the pages of his memoir. “It’s not like I was looking at the entire biography and going, ‘Okay, so this happens and then this and this and this,” Johnson explains.

In fact, the months the movie covers are described only briefly in the book. “There was something about the limited canvas of these two chapters of *Kitchen Confidential* that Bourdain writes about that just opened my eyes to, *Oh, it’s so little time that actually makes us who we are*,” Johnson says. “It really happens all in an instant.”

While the relative lack of information was limiting in some ways, Johnson says, “It also helped because it meant that there is no counterfactual. It’s not like I’ve made a movie that is standing in the face of the official narrative, because there really is none.”

Plus, since Bourdain’s writing about that time “is so unbelievably vague and, by all accounts, exaggerated to high heaven at some moments,” the director says he was in “a great position to try to figure out, *Okay, so how do I think these things happened?*”

A kid in need of an ass-kicking

Anthony Bourdain (center) at a garden party in Provincetown circa 1976.

While *Kitchen Confidential* doesn’t go into much detail about Bourdain’s formative summers in Provincetown, he does paint a stark picture of himself at that time. “I was, to be frank, a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” he writes in the book (a passage that also serves as the film’s epigraph).

The movie opens with Sessa’s awkward, cocky Tony applying for a grant at Vassar to write a novel, confidently telling anyone who’d listen he had it in the bag. When he doesn’t get it, he lies to his friends and parents, saying he was selected.

Meanwhile, out drinking one night, he reconnects with an old high school crush, Nancy, who tells him that she’s spending the summer with friends in Provincetown. So, Tony decides to follow her there, but when he arrives, he discovers her locking lips with her boyfriend at the pizza shop where they’re both working. To avoid further humiliation, he tells her that he’s only in town to write his novel.

Dominic Sessa transforms into Anthony Bourdain in the first look at 'Tony' (exclusive)

Dominic Sessa and Antonio Banderas star in heartfelt trailer for Anthony Bourdain biopic 'Tony'

In real life, Bourdain and Nancy met in high school at Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey, where she was a year ahead of him. He was so infatuated with her that when she got accepted to Vassar, he decided to graduate a year early and follow her there. Unlike the movie, they planned to go to Provincetown together.

Nancy really did work at a pizza shop, though, and those scenes from the film were actually shot in the same location. “We shot it at the real place, and I learned as I was making the movie that Nancy actually worked at Spiritus Pizza that summer in real life,” Charlie Harrington, the locations manager, told *Traveller*. “Tony apparently used to sleep on top of the walk-in cooler in the back because he became friends with the owner. He ended up marrying Nancy, the girl he’s chasing the whole movie.”

Farm-to-table

Dominic Sessa and Leo Woodall in ‘Tony’.

Seacia Pavao/A24

Living in Provincetown, Bourdain landed his first job in a kitchen, reluctantly working as a lowly dishwasher at a seafood shack to pay rent. His experiences there, and the friendships he formed with his eccentric co-workers, changed his life and eventually inspired him to drop out of Vassar and enroll at the Culinary Institute of America.

To better understand this period, Johnson moved to Provincetown for about two months. “The lucky break I caught was that I was there in the off-season,” he says, “so a huge number of the people that I met knew Anthony Bourdain when he was young.”

Much of the screenplay comes from those “unbelievable firsthand accounts of all these people, many of whom are in the movie, because they were just so happy to talk about it and to disabuse me of a lot of misunderstandings.”

Dropping the pan

Michael Jibrin as Tyrone and Stavros Halkias as Dmitri in ‘Tony’.

One of the “most famous” of those misunderstandings concerns a story presented in the movie much the same way it’s described in the book: an overwhelmed Bourdain burns his hand on a hot sauté pan and makes the mistake of asking Tyrone, a veteran cook, for bandages and burn cream. The seasoned vet proceeds to embarrass him by picking up the scorching pan with his bare, calloused hand. (In the book, Bourdain cites this incident as his motivation to go to culinary school.)

But when Johnson spoke to the real cook about this story, he remembered it a little differently. “Yeah, Tony picked up the pan and burned his hand, but I did not pick it up with my bare hands,” he told the filmmaker. “I got a towel, picked it up, and put it away. I have no idea why Tony said that I picked it up with my bare hand. That’s insane. I would never do that.”

The real Tyrone might not have understood why Bourdain exaggerated the story, but Johnson seems to. “I decided, *well, I better not actually change this*,” the director says. “It says it all, you know what I mean?”

Director Matt Johnson and Dominic Sessa on the set of ‘Tony’.

Another legendary tale from this time, recreated in the movie, involves a large wedding party dining at the seafood restaurant (in *Kitchen Confidential*, it’s called the Dreadnaught, but the film uses its real name, the Flagship).

Long story short, Bourdain sees the bride having a private conversation with the head chef, Bobby, who asks him to watch his station before disappearing with the newlywed. Curious, Bourdain and his fellow kitchen workers look for Bobby through the back window, and see him having sex with the bride, still in her wedding gown, as her groom and family are eating inside the restaurant.

Bourdain calls this the moment he knew he wanted to be a chef.

“Not only is it real, it’s central to the text,” Johnson says with a laugh. “It just seemed like that was the thing that made him a star, the fact that he recalled, invented, conveyed this image and this story. And so I didn’t dare mess with the account on that instance. I didn’t dare. Because I knew I would not be beloved had I done it.”

A cast of characters

Antonio Banderas, Dominic Sessa, and Leo Woodall in ‘Tony’.

One of the most influential characters Tony meets at the Flagship is Leo Woodall’s Sal, a swaggering, drug-addled cook loosely modeled on one of Bourdain’s close friends from his time in New York: a brilliant-but-troubled baker he calls Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown.

“He was so central, a close friend, but also an inveterate drug user,” Johnson says. “The kind of guy that you wanted by your side because you knew that if a fight broke out, he would kill the other person to keep you safe. But at the same time, he was going to go on a bender and not show up for work for three days.”

Stavros Halkias plays another close friend, Dimitri, who, in real life, started a short-lived, coke-fueled catering business with Bourdain, servicing high-end clientele in Provincetown.

Antonio Banderas and Dominic Sessa in ‘Tony’.

Seacia Pavao/A24

Then there’s Antonio Banderas’ Chef, “a version of Tony’s first real boss in New York, a guy he affectionately called Bigfoot,” Johnson explains. Though Bourdain didn’t meet Bigfoot until he went to culinary school, the director says he “quite intentionally” included him as a character in the movie because Sessa’s Tony “needed that figure in order to become the person we knew.”

While the real Bigfoot (whose actual name is Andy Menschel) is an imposing Jewish restaurateur Bourdain describes as a “West Village legend,” Banderas’ version is a quiet, talented, but underachieving local, a remnant of the town’s Portuguese roots, who lives alone by the beach. But like his real-life counterpart, Chef’s knowledge and passion for a well-run kitchen and good food prepared the right way make a deep, lasting impact on Bourdain.

“I took everything from that guy, because he so clearly creates Bourdain,” Johnson says of Bigfoot. “I look at Bourdain, I read Bourdain, and I go, ‘This guy is just 50 percent these pirates he met in the kitchens at Provincetown and 50 percent Bigfoot…And I don’t think that that’s a simplistic reduction of him, by the way. I actually think that makes for the legendary, heroic, traveling figure that we all love.”

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Tony’s legacy

Anthony Bourdain. Mario Tama/Getty Images

By showing Bourdain before the fame, as an awkward kid struggling to find his place and falling on his face, Johnson hopes audiences will feel the same inspiration he felt when he set out to make this movie*. *

“What makes Bourdain so fascinating and so mythic, and what elevates him in the public conception to a saint, which is what has happened, is that he did fail. He was a true failure,” the director says.

“He came within an inch of death when he was young, and then crested that and became really a traveling hero,” he continues. “Somebody who went to all these different cultures, shared ours, but also absorbed theirs and brought it back for us…And the idea that he started also as a complicated young man who did not have it figured out, who was all mixed up and bitter and resentful and all the things he says about himself, I think gives everybody some hope for themselves. It certainly does it for me.”

*Tony *is now in theaters.

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