“This Is a Movie About Becoming”: Team “Tony” on Anthony Bourdain’s Provincetown Summer

The audience at the recent Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) greeted the director and actors of the upcoming Tony with cheers, even though the film wasn’t finished in time for the event (A24 will release it on August 7).

Tony is about a foundational summer that 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) spends working in the kitchen of a Provincetown restaurant in the 1970s, which was a local happening.

The town played a central role in the story just as it did in shaping Bourdain’s future as an innovative chef, writer and global traveler. The cast and crew spent nearly a week shooting in the Cape Cod town, and the film prominently features iconic locations, from the pier to bustling Commercial Street to popular eateries such as Spiritus Pizza and the Lobster Pot.

Director Matt Johnson told the enthusiastic PIFF audience that they will be “extremely happy” with how their town looks (“beautiful and mysterious”) on the big screen, giving a shout out to veteran DP Michael Bauman. Johnson appeared at PIFF in conversation with Tony star Sessa, whose breakout role was in director Alexander Payne’s 2023 Massachusetts-set The Holdovers, and Leo Woodall who plays Sal, a restaurant worker at the Flagship, the long-closed restaurant Bourdain called “The Dreadnaught” in his bestselling 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential. The cast also includes Stavros Halkias, Emilia Jones, Dagmara Dominczyk, Rich Sommer, and Antonio Banderas as chef and restaurant owner Ciro, who hires Bourdain as a dishwasher and recognizes his potential.

“Antonio is amazing and funny in the movie. He is an incredible cook; he owns restaurants in Spain. He came ready to work, ready to cook, and he saved us in many scenes,” Johnson said.

Tony is an origin story, said Johnson, who worked from a script by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe based on Kitchen Confidential. When Bourdain arrived in Provincetown in 1972, “he thought he was going to be a writer,” said Johnson. “This is a movie about becoming. It’s not about the guy we know from [Bourdain’s television series] No Reservations and Parts Unknown. It’s about finding role models when you’re young. The chefs he trained under created him, and they don’t even know it.”

Johnson shaped the script while living in Provincetown for two months during the off-season before shooting began. He worked closely with Sessa, who’d already been cast as Bourdain.

“When I met Dom for the first time, I saw somebody wrestling with some of the same ideas at that age, and we used that shared history to approach the character,” said Johnson. “Dom is from New Jersey, not far from where Anthony Bourdain grew up. I did not want him to do an impression. Dom and I found things that were relevant and meaningful to us that we could connect to [Tony’s] history,” Johnson said.

When he met Woodall, who plays Tony’s gruff kitchen colleague turned friend, Johnson said he “looked into his eyes and I saw older guys I looked up to [when I was younger]. Luckily, Leo and Dom struck up a friendship that was a lot like the dynamic between the two characters.”

Bourdain’s three summers in Provincetown were condensed into one for the film. Provincetown turned out to be one of the “big transitional periods in life that shaped who he is and the way he presents to the world,” said Sessa. “For me, it was in high school when I started doing theater and learned to be vulnerable and reveal myself and show the truth of who I was. We wanted to capture that transitional point that shot him into writing and living this life.”

Sessa said he “never wanted to do a biopic or play a real person. This was a level of agony I had. There was no footage to work off. I read [Bourdain’s] writing, and I watched Parts Unknown. There are pictures of him, and those were my main reference.” Sessa added that when he and Johnson were tweaking the script, “we had a relationship; he put things in my voice. If something sounded off, we’d make it more true.”

“It was a ground-up exploration,” Johnson added. “Every line Tony says in the movie is something I heard Dom say, or is connected to a shared theme of ‘Who am I and what am I going to do with my life?’ We built the characters up so much that it feels improvised because it is coming from who they were to me.”

British actor Woodall, best known for season 2 of The White Lotus and the recent crime thriller Tuner, had no kitchen experience before playing Sal required him to shuck oysters like a seasoned chef, a tough task when “you can’t even look at the oyster,” he said. “Sal is a combination of fun and terrifying. I didn’t necessarily enjoy Sal, but the way we shot the film, I went for it. That’s fun for an actor to play.”

As the motley Flagship kitchen crew, Halkias, Woodall, and Sessa improvised much of their repartee to the delight of the director. “The shooting space was very small. I would just roll, and these guys would start going,” said Johnson.

Johnson drew inspiration from his two months in Provincetown during “dark times of February in an Airbnb” while putting the screenplay together. “There was nobody on the street except people walking their dogs. But year-round people gave me stories and insane information,” he said. Johnson recalled a 2014 episode of Parts Unknown when Bourdain returned to Massachusetts and reflected on his time in Provincetown. “He’s here in the off-season; it looks cold, but he has a smile on his face, and he says, ‘What was I so angry about? This place is so beautiful.’ That was a clue for me. He looked at his life in Provincetown with nostalgia and also regret.”

Tony comes to theaters on August 7. 

Featured image: (L-R) Dominic Sessa, Leo Woodall. Credit: Seacia Pavao