Dominic Sessa is Anthony Bourdain in the first trailer for A24’s Tony, helmed by Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie director and star Matt Johnson.
We first learned that Sessa, then riding high after a breakout performance in Alexander Payne’s widely acclaimed The Holdovers, was attached to the project back in 2024. While it wasn’t immediately clear, exactly, which period of Bourdain’s life would be depicted in the story, clarity arrived on Tuesday (May 5) with the release of the film’s trailer.
Tony finds Sessa portraying a young Bourdain during his formative years in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Bourdain, who died by suicide at the age of 61 in 2018, made the impact of this period of his life clear in his work as a writer and beyond, including in his revelatory 2000 book Kitchen Confidential.
“Okay, so I’m just gonna walk you through the basic vision of it: it’s a coming-of-age story,” Sessa’s Tony says in the opening moments of the new trailer.
From there, he notes that “a lot” has changed since high school, including the fact that he’s now a writer poised for “this huge writing fellowship.” However, when that fellowship falls through, Tony is led elsewhere, and eventually, into the restaurant world.
“I’m actually not a fucking cook,” Tony corrects a fellow kitchen worker at one point. “I’m a writer.”
But by the end of the trailer, Tony’s view of himself has shifted, setting him on the path that would later lead him to immortality.
“If anybody asks, I’m not a writer,” he says. “I work in the kitchen.”
Joining Sessa in Johnson’s exploration of this chapter of Bourdain’s rise to a unique variety of fame are Emilia Jones, Dagmara Dominczyk, Rich Sommers, Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall, and Antonio Banderas. Johnson is also credited as a writer alongside Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe. Handling music is Jay McCarrol, Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie collaborator.
Watch the trailer above. Tony is in theaters this August.
The late Bourdain invited viewers, and readers, along for the ride as he merged his prowess as a travel documentarian, his love for the familial heart of food around the world, and his warts-and-all style of writing into a hugely influential presence on culture at large.
There was truly no one like him, and from the looks of the first Tony trailer, it seems Johnson and company may very well have captured that.
