{"id":855408,"date":"2026-08-14T21:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T21:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/855408\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T21:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T21:34:14","slug":"before-he-was-anthony-bourdain-he-was-a-young-lout-badly-in-need-of-a-good-ass-kicking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/855408\/","title":{"rendered":"Before he was Anthony Bourdain, he was a \u2018young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In Sydney, in Melbourne, in Boston and New York, haloed murals of \u201cSaint Tony\u201d \u2013 the beloved chef, writer and TV personality Anthony Bourdain \u2013 pay tribute to his rebellious spirit and moral integrity. On Instagram and Reddit threads, fans cite his quotes like ancient scriptures that hold the meaning of life: \u201cYour body is not a temple, it\u2019s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.\u201d<\/p>\n

After his tragic death in June 2018, aged 61, Bourdain\u2019s mythical pull has only intensified. It\u2019s amusing then that, in the face of such reverence, A24\u2019s new film Tony beckons cinemagoers with an unsuspecting whisper: You love Anthony Bourdain? Come, let us tell you the story about when he was a young piece of crap.<\/p>\n

Dominic Sessa laughs mischievously at my summation. Before making the film, he couldn\u2019t have picked Bourdain in a police lineup, anyway.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know he means something important to so many people, but for me, I wasn\u2019t a huge fan. He didn\u2019t exist in my life the way he does for millions of people. And that was the reason I felt comfortable doing it,\u201d says Sessa of taking on the role of a man who, even from the beyond, remains a daily household fixture in reruns of his hit TV series, No Reservations and Parts Unknown.<\/p>\n

\"BourdainBourdain was 19 when he fled to Provincetown, about the same age as Sessa when he started working on Tony.Bob Gruen<\/p>\n

Tony is a film that could be subtitled \u201cBourdain: The Incel Years\u201d. It takes the early chapters of Bourdain\u2019s bestselling 2000 book Kitchen Confidential \u2013 mainly his evocative telling of absconding at 19 to Provincetown, off Cape Cod, where his kitchen journey began \u2013 and crafts an affecting coming-of-age tale.<\/p>\n

When we first meet Sessa\u2019s Bourdain, he\u2019s bloviating to college literary professors about his plans to update Orwell\u2019s Down and Out in Paris and London. He stalks bars with a pair of nunchucks in his pants, hitting on sorority girls and bartenders with uncomfortable desperation. Painfully insecure, he lies and lies and lies. With the notch turned up slightly, he\u2019d be Rick from The Young Ones<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d imagine this was an odd invention from writer-director Matt Johnson<\/a> (in Johnson\u2019s hands, even Bourdain\u2019s infamous oyster awakening gets twisted towards shame), if it wasn\u2019t all there in Bourdain\u2019s own writing. From the beginning of his public profile, Bourdain never hid his demons and was quick to self-scrutiny. An \u201cinsider\u2019s edition\u201d of Kitchen Confidential, released in 2013 and featuring scribbled footnotes from the author, finds Bourdain furiously taking the piss out of sentences he\u2019d written just over a decade before, fed up by a tone he now saw as pompous and self-important.<\/p>\n

The film revels in that disposition \u2013 the man on the way to the man \u2013 taking as its starting gun a quote from the same book where Bourdain summed up his own youthful (un)appeal. \u201cI was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SessaSessa with director Matt Johnson on the set of Tony.A24 via AP<\/p>\n

In a culture struggling to salvage young men from the clutches of toxic masculinity, it\u2019s a loaded launch. After #MeToo, Bourdain apologised for how Kitchen Confidential \u2013 full as it was with fighting and f\u2014ing, as much as food \u2013 might have contributed to the era\u2019s \u201cboys will be boys\u201d permissiveness.<\/p>\n

But in the film, he\u2019s still a young scrub in search of a role model, latching onto mentors both bad (Leo Woodall\u2019s drug-abusing, womanising line cook Sal) and good (Antonio Banderas\u2019 wizened, zen-like Chef). For Sessa, this was the appropriate entry point.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t relate to the Bourdain everyone knows, this guy who is writing novels and working in kitchens in a professional sense, but I can relate to being an impressionable young person with pessimistic views on the world and a sense of entitlement. I know what that feels like,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time in his life, he saw like, \u2018Wow, I can live my life this way? I can party and drink and do drugs and have sex and also make incredible food at the same time?\u2019 It was in that excitement, at that moment of being opened up to this, where this person was formed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sessa is speaking over Zoom from high above the Los Angeles skyline, in the office headquarters of film distribution darling, A24. The sun is beaming in LA, but with his mussy hair and sunken eyes \u2013 a \u201970s character actor out of time \u2013 Sessa looks exhausted. Deep into the film\u2019s press campaign, he\u2019s been answering the same inane questions about his cooking skills for days. Well, he\u2019s not getting a reprieve from me. How are his cooking skills now?<\/p>\n

\u201cAbout the same,\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, I can shuck an oyster and I can saut\u00e9 some vegetables. I know how to make a paella now, thanks to Antonio Banderas. Not an incredibly difficult thing, but it feels good. And I know how to hold a knife a little bit better, which is encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

At 23, Sessa is only marginally older than Bourdain was when he took up the dishwashing job that set the path to his life in food. Born in New Jersey to a teacher mother and a father who worked in payroll (his father died when Sessa was 14), in tenth grade he earned a scholarship to the elite boarding school Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts to play ice hockey. When he broke his femur before his first season, he shifted his interest towards drama classes. He was still at school when he landed his first professional role in Alexander Payne\u2019s The Holdovers, where he held his own against prime Paul Giamatti.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the same way that Tony is in the movie, I\u2019ve felt myself role-playing some sort of version of myself that I thought I had to be in order to be respected,\u201d says Sessa. \u201cWhen I was in high school, I put a lot of pressure on myself to seem smart and capable. But it wasn\u2019t until I started acting that I was like, \u2018Oh, I actually could be good at this in real life, not just in my head.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"AntonioAntonio Banderas plays Chef, a kind and disciplined mentor for young Bourdain.A24 via AP<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s sort of the moment that Bourdain is having in this movie. For so much of it he\u2019s telling people, \u2018I\u2019m good at writing, I\u2019m going to be the next great American novelist\u2019, but he has nothing to show for it. And then he has this experience working in a kitchen where he actually does something and gets better at it. He learns how to make a Lobster Thermidor! I think that\u2019s pretty relatable for people. When you\u2019re able to work with integrity and honesty, it changes your life. It happened for me and it happened for Bourdain, and I hope it encourages people to participate in voluntary hardships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Tony started shooting, Sessa did a brief placement in a Brooklyn bistro to learn the kitchen environment. Much of the film\u2019s authenticity, however, comes from the cast\u2019s rakish camaraderie.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t have that much time [filming], but when we were in Provincetown that\u2019s where we really bonded,\u201d Sessa recalls. \u201cLeo would do barbecues. He had a really cool house that he rented in Cape Cod with a backyard and a grill, so every weekend we would just go to his place and have a barbecue, drink some beers, enjoy the summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SessaSessa and Emilia Jones at a clambake in Tony.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s other star is Provincetown, those seaside streets where Bourdain walked and worked. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain wrote about the town evocatively as a Portuguese fishing community turned \u201cpirate colony\u201d, a home to burnouts, stoners, hippies and freaks. Sessa says there are still people living in the community who remembered Bourdain, and were eager to share their smallest interactions with him.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cA few of the restaurants he worked at are still there and operating. The pizza shop in the movie, Spiritus Pizza, the same family owns that place and they all remember him because he used to sleep above that place during the summers,\u201d says Sessa.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother is a restaurant called Ciro and Sal\u2019s, owned by the Luster Brothers. These guys are younger than Bourdain but they worked with him when he was the same age as me, early 20s, working in the kitchen, washing dishes, trying to cook. They told us endless stories. But, I mean, a lot of the stuff we couldn\u2019t really utilise because it was too graphic,\u201d Sessa adds with a laugh. As ever, Bourdain\u2019s spirit lives on.<\/p>\n

Tony is in cinemas from August 20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":855409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":["post-855408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}