NJ’s Dominic Sessa Talks Becoming Anthony Bourdain For New Biopic

His name conjures fragrant street markets, transcendent hole-in-the-wall joints and enchanting dispatches from savory food travelogues. Each scene narrated, as always, with an unmistakable zest for devouring life’s pleasures.

But Anthony Bourdain didn’t spring into the world a fully formed gourmand. At 19, he was an aspiring writer from New Jersey who hadn’t yet worked in a kitchen. And if you asked him, he had a lot of living to do. “I was —to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain would write 25 years later. He didn’t become a household name until his late 40s.

At 19, Dominic Sessa—who plays Bourdain in the new biopic Tony—was already on the brink of stardom. By 21, he was winning awards for his breakout role opposite Paul Giamatti and Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023). Sessa’s charming performance as a student forced to spend Christmas break with his ornery teacher became his ticket to a flourishing career as an actor. But five movies later, he feels more like a young Bourdain than a polished celebrity.

“I’m also in that stage of my life where I’m trying to become a better version of myself,” says Sessa, 23. “It’s challenging and it’s painful.”

The New Jersey actor is the star of Tony, a portrait of Anthony Bourdain—artist of food and language—as a young man.

The A24 film from director Matt Johnson opens August 7 in New York and August 21 nationwide. It’s a coming-of-age story set over the course of summer 1975 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the seaside destination at the top of Cape Cod. Sessa’s performance as a stubborn, pretentious and dejected young Bourdain illustrates how his destructive flailing served as an important period of self-discovery.

“I think Matt really recognized that in me and recognized that in himself when he was my age,” Sessa tells New Jersey Monthly. “And it was something that he wanted for me, not only to perform in the movie, but also walk out of the experience learning about myself and being a better person.”

Like everyone else, Johnson first took notice of Sessa’s potent screen presence in The Holdovers, another 1970s story. Of course, it helps that the rangy actor has most of Bourdain’s height, while his curly hair easily plays the kind of mane Tony was working with in the ’70s.

The movie pulls from Bourdain’s own recollections of his youth, as told in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Published in 2000, the bestselling book propelled his writing and eventual TV career after he wrote the 1999 warts-and-all restaurant kitchen essay Don’t Eat Before Reading This for The New Yorker. Bourdain, former executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York, would go on to host shows on Food Network, the Travel Channel and CNN, including Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. These travel series made him a face, voice and ambassador for global food exploration and cultural appreciation before his death by suicide in 2018.

Reading Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential quote about his “miserable, narcissistic” youth hit home for Sessa, who was born in Cherry Hill and grew up in Egg Harbor Township and Ocean City.

“All of those aspects are so alive in all of young people, especially young men, I think, and amplifying that part of yourself is really difficult, and it’s like a voluntary hardship that I chose,” he says of his experience filming the movie. “But then, coming out of it, I feel like I have a better sense of self. I’m more self-aware.”

Tony starts with Bourdain living a suburban New Jersey life with his parents and brother in Leonia (look for Montclair’s own Dagmara Domińczyk as his mother, Gladys, a future New York Times copy editor who had a hand in getting Bourdain’s essay to The New Yorker). The Dwight-Englewood School graduate and Vassar College student is frustrated by a setback in his young writing life. So he leaves to follow his crush Nancy Putkoski—his high school sweetheart and future wife, played by Emilia Jones—to sunny Cape Cod. Tony, rejected from a writing fellowship program, lies to Nancy, telling her he just happens to be there for the fellowship. The lies spiral from there.

Decades later, people appreciate the world traveler precisely because of his forthrightness. If you wanted someone to mince words, it wasn’t Anthony Bourdain.

“His writing style generally was just very honest, and you felt like this person was always telling the truth and is allergic to bullshit,” Sessa says. “It’s also very self-deprecating. And I think people gravitate towards people like that who are able to reflect very honestly on the negative aspects of their life and reveal those sides of themselves.”

Jersey’s World Explorer

Bourdain’s signature voiceovers — lovingly rendered, intimate reflections on places, food and people—drew fans from here to Madagascar. The main attraction wasn’t just the food. It was spending an hour seeing the world through a Bourdain filter—curious, wry and somewhat skeptical, but always incisive and open to learning something new.

“The story of his life is inspiring for anyone,” Sessa says. “It gives people a sense of hope. You can feel like your life is predetermined, and things are kind of set out for you, and time feels really short, but he’s a story of a man who, in the middle of his life, became one of the most iconic figures to exist, like a prophet almost.”

The years since Bourdain’s death, in 2018 at age 61, have seen the release of a documentary about him and the publication of two Bourdain biographies. His passing brought his lifelong tangles with depression into focus. Sessa and Johnson, 40, approached Tony with a reverence for Bourdain, but also a willingness to plug their own experiences into his story. Johnson wrote the script while living in Provincetown.

Part of this meld involved Sessa bringing his own Jerseyness to young Tony. When we meet Bourdain, he’s gone on vacation to France with his family (his dad’s side is French), but his extensive travels wouldn’t come until later.

“I think people in New Jersey are, like, always trying to get out of New Jersey,” Sessa says. “There’s this level of ambition. The people around me and people I grew up with, it’s like they want to see the world. They want to adventure and do something worthwhile. And then ultimately, you get to a stage where you wanna go back,” he says with a slight chuckle. “I think that’s consistent for a lot of people from New Jersey … Being able to go to Philadelphia at a young age and go to New York City at a young age really encouraged me to explore and be exposed to things that were exciting.”

Bourdain’s sense of wonder for every corner of the globe extended to an appraisal of his own Jersey food memories. After his death, the state remembered him with an Anthony Bourdain Food Trail. The route traced his TV steps in the Garden State, from hot dogs at Hiram’s Roadstand in Fort Lee to the seafood tower at Dock’s Oyster House in Atlantic City.

“We have some of the best food, like, low key,” Sessa says. “I remember growing up, I would go to Tony’s Baltimore Grill in Atlantic City, which is a place that Bourdain would often go, and his name was always on the sign, you know, like he was there. It’s interesting, I’ve never met him, I’ve never really cared to learn about him until years after he passed away, and yet there’s like this weird connection that’s been there my whole life that I never really thought about, even just in a restaurant that I really liked going to growing up.”

The Fork in the Road

In Tony, a young Bourdain only finds his way when he’s physically thrown out of a bar.

The chef-owner of a no-frills local seafood place, played by Antonio Banderas, scoops the reedy teen up and deposits him on his hammock. Bourdain, awakened by a bucket of cold water, goes from working off his bar tab by washing dishes to learning the discipline of food prep. What he absorbs in the kitchen from Chef (the character is otherwise unnamed) and the kitchen staff refocuses his passions.

Young Tony’s dreams of writing a bildungsroman and finding success as an author make way for his own real-life coming-of-age story. He leaves Vassar and pursues studies at the Culinary Institute of America. The redirection would lead Bourdain to the kind of fame that would someday land him at a table in Vietnam, eating noodles and drinking beer with then-sitting President Barack Obama.

Jersey nurtured Bourdain, but Provincetown became his crossroads, the place where he found a new path through the people he met and worked with, making food and living within the rhythms of the Cape.

“Being exposed to something like that definitely planted the seed for him to want to connect with people for the rest of his life,” Sessa says. “The movie takes place over one summer, but he worked there for several summers. All the people that remember him still talk about him to this day because he was there working a job in the kitchen. At a young age, that was how he connected with people, was through food, so I think whether or not he was conscious of that, it was probably a part of why he felt compelled to continue doing it.”

I think people in New Jersey are, like, always trying to get out of New Jersey….And then ultimately, you get to a stage where you wanna go back.

Dominic Sessa

Sessa’s own rise to stardom also involved a fair bit of redirection. As with Bourdain, it happened in New England. Sessa, a former hockey player, applied to Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, in part for its competitive hockey program. An injury set the stage for Sessa’s detour to acting and theater after he broke his femur in a skateboarding accident. Needing a new extracurricular activity, he auditioned for the school’s fall play (Antigone). Sessa was in his senior year at Deerfield when Alexander Payne chose him to play boarding school student Angus Tully in The Holdovers, which filmed at his school and held auditions there. When the young actor attended the Oscars with his co-stars in 2024, he was on leave from his sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama in Pittsburgh.

“I guess I would’ve graduated by now. Yeah, all of my friends are graduating, so it’s too late,” Sessa says with a laugh.

He may not have a degree, but he’s become one of the most sought-after young actors in Hollywood. Instead of returning to college, he stayed booked and busy. Last year, Sessa starred in the box office success Now You See Me: Now You Don’t as one of several young magicians to join the Lionsgate franchise. He also played Michelle Pfeiffer’s son in the Amazon holiday movie Oh. What. Fun. and shared the screen with Rose Byrne as an underdog lawyer in the indie film Tow before having his Bourdain moment.

The actor first met with Johnson more than two years ago.

“I’ve never had a movie be a part of my life as long as this one has,” Sessa says. “Everything else I’ve done, it’s like I auditioned for it, and then in a month or so, went out, did the movie, but this was really kind of building something with a partner.”

Part of that process meant filming in Bourdain and Putkoski’s Provincetown haunts and working with Tony’s real-life friend, the French chef Eric Ripert, who appears in the movie. Sessa started by getting a taste of the work Bourdain left behind.

It wasn’t until after Bourdain’s death that Sessa noticed peers diving into his many travels.

“That’s when you started seeing a lot of young people talking about him on social media and talking about his writing and really getting into his shows and stuff,” he says. “It’s kind of the tragic irony of something like that, where something really tragic happened and then as a result of that, he ended up influencing an entirely new generation.”