{"id":854224,"date":"2026-08-11T13:50:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/854224\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T13:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:50:11","slug":"canadian-matt-johnson-gets-taste-of-hollywood-with-anthony-bourdain-biopic-tony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/854224\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian Matt Johnson gets taste of Hollywood with Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Dominic Sessa and Matt Johnson on the set of Tony, a biopic about Anthony Bourdain.Bob Gruenon\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Given Anthony Bourdain\u2019s predilection for oysters, meatballs and classically prepared Caesar salad (\u201cGod does not want you to put chicken in your Caesar\u201d), the late chef and author would no doubt approve of the spread laid out before director Matt Johnson at the Toronto premiere for Tony<\/a>, the Canadian filmmaker\u2019s new Bourdain biopic. But it wasn\u2019t Bourdain\u2019s love of food that sparked Johnson\u2019s interest in the culinary icon. It was something darker, messier and even a little bit nauseating \u2013 perhaps enough to cause the strongest-stomached gourmand to upchuck all those oysters.<\/p>\n

In the second chapter of Bourdain\u2019s bestselling 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, the chef recalled his days as a 19-year-old wannabe novelist working as a dishwasher inside a seafood joint in Cape Cod, Mass. During a wedding reception one night, Bourdain spots the head chef having clandestine sex in the alleyway, his newfound lover none other than the blushing bride, her white dress hiked up to her knees. \u201cI knew then, dear reader, for the first time: I wanted to be a chef,\u201d Bourdain wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo many people have mentioned that part with a grin on their face, like, \u2018Isn\u2019t that cool?\u2019\u201d says Johnson, staring warily at the hunks of pancetta in front of him. \u201cBut I found that image inverted, almost satanic. Not religiously, but there is something evil about that symbol. I understand the thrill of it, and it speaks to Bourdain\u2019s libertine philosophy. But there\u2019s tragedy in that image, too, and the movie is trying to unpack that. If Anthony was here and we could interrogate him, I have trouble believing that he would say anything other than he hoped to mature past that. It\u2019s something that both Dom and I stuck to.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Antonio Banderas and Johnson on the set of Tony.Seacia Pavao\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Dom in this case is Dominic Sessa, the wiry young actor who was plucked from obscurity to land the lead role in the hit 2023 comedy The Holdovers<\/a> and here plays a teenage Bourdain with the kind of overconfidence that portends either genius or disaster. With Sessa in every single scene, Tony abandons the tropes of a traditional cradle-to-grave biopic to focus solely on the summer of 1975, when Bourdain was introduced to the pleasures and perversions of life in the kitchen. Intimate and intense, Johnson\u2019s film is not about the fame and addiction that Bourdain would one day face, but the wild, confusing contours of a youth in revolt, in which myths are built and broken a dozen times over. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we met,\u201d Sessa says, \u201cMatt and I started talking about our paths \u2013 how different my life is now from just a few years ago. We started to realize that we both had a lot of similarities in our sentiments toward the world, and those moments of life in transition, discovery. The window into telling this story was realizing that myself, Matt and Anthony all had similar views of the world when we were the same age.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sessa and Johnson first connected after the latter was basking in the warm reception to BlackBerry<\/a>, his 2023 Canadian dramedy charting the rise and fall of the eponymous mobile device. Quickly after that film broke out \u2013 winning a record 14 Canadian Screen Awards<\/a> \u2013 Johnson and his Toronto-based production company Zapruder Films were inundated with offers to adapt all manner of semi-biographical screenplays, including the spec script for Tony by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe. Unfamiliar with Bourdain\u2019s career, Johnson didn\u2019t give the project too much attention until March, 2024, when the director and his long-time producer and co-writer Matthew Miller sat down for lunch at New York\u2019s Hotel Chelsea with Sessa, whom they wanted to meet after being impressed with his performance in The Holdovers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithin 30 minutes, I was like, \u2018Dom, we\u2019re going to make this movie about Anthony Bourdain.\u2019 It was us getting excited about exactly the things you see in the movie,\u201d Johnson recalls. \u201cA young man lying to create status. What\u2019s it like to have all your self-worth tied up in how women see you. The power of homosocial relationships as a developmental tool. And then my job was to bring Bourdain into this conspiracy and read everything that he\u2019d written and go, \u2018Okay, let\u2019s see where you agree with us.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Sessa, left, with Leo Woodall in Tony. Sessa plays Bourdain as a teenager during the summer of 1975.Seacia Pavao\/Supplied<\/p>\n

With Sessa onboard, the team \u2013 including Star Thrower, the U.S. production company that had been developing the film with Bartels and Howe, and already had the Bourdain estate\u2019s approval \u2013 sold the project to hotshot indie studio A24 (Backrooms, Marty Supreme). This marked the first time that Johnson and Miller would produce a film outside the insular Canadian system in which they made all their previous projects, including their other big 2026 release, the riotous comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time I make a movie in Canada, I\u2019m putting my neck on the line, our company on the line. The amount of risk is enormous,\u201d Miller says. \u201cThis was the first time that we\u2019ve ever made a movie where our producer fees don\u2019t immediately go back into the movie. Nobody talks about it, but that\u2019s how every Canadian movie gets made. So getting to enter that studio system is amazing. But like anything, it comes with a cost. And that is you have less control. They\u2019re going to call the shots, but that\u2019s their prerogative because they paid to make the movie.\u201d <\/p>\n

How Nirvanna\u2019s Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol became the border-busting kings of a new CanCon era<\/a><\/p>\n

Part of embracing that new kind of partnership meant that only a handful of Johnson\u2019s frequent behind-the-scenes players \u2013 editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, composer\/co-star\/co-writer Jay McCarrol, visual-effects supervisor Tristan Zerafa \u2013 would join him on Tony, and mostly only once filming wrapped. But the director gained an army of new Hollywood partners, including production designer Ryan Warren Smith (The Holdovers) and cinematographer Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another). Together, they brought the bohemian paradise of Provincetown, Mass., circa 1975 to life during a compressed spring 2025 on-location shoot. (The team had to wrap by the Fourth of July weekend, when they\u2019d be priced out by tourists.)<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe this is too personal, but Michael and I cried when we wrapped,\u201d Johnson says. \u201cWe became the best of friends and he supported me in everything I did \u2013 and I had only talked with him for 25 minutes on a Zoom before we started.\u201d <\/p>\n

Crucially, Johnson adds, Bauman helped shape the film\u2019s aesthetic, a departure from the more jittery, guerrilla-like camerawork displayed in the director\u2019s previous features. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe design in mind was viewers would be flipping through the pages of a book. That\u2019s a huge challenge to conceptualize, because I\u2019m so used to the grammar of documentary. Michael was far and away the most experienced person on our set, and because he believed in me, it gave me so much loft.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, after Johnson spent months in Cape Cod \u2013 flying there in March, 2025, immediately after Nirvanna premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Tex., in order to conduct on-the-ground research and dive deeper into the screenplay \u2013 the director was thrilled to handle postproduction back home in Toronto. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the plane touched down at Pearson, I kissed the ground. A24 was so gracious, and said, \u2018You let us know when you want us to see something.\u2019 So I found myself in Toronto with my friends, and it was like, wait a minute, we know how to do this,\u2019\u201d Johnson says.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the brain trust of Zapruder Films \u2013 cinematographer Jared Raab, producer Matt Greyson, production designer Adam Belanger, actor Ben Petrie, filmmaker Luca Tarantini \u2013 are all listed as members of Tony\u2019s \u201cscreening committee\u201d in the film\u2019s end credits. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe real magic was me getting to show them the work. They had no idea what we did over there, but they know everything about me,\u201d Johnson says. \u201cAnd their feedback was the feedback that made the movie.\u201d <\/p>\n

After Bourdain\u2019s real-life stint in Cape Cod, he studied at New York\u2019s Culinary Institute of America, going on to become one of the most influential voices in not only the restaurant world, but pop culture \u2013 all without ever forgetting where he got his start. Johnson is arguably staring down a similar path.<\/p>\n

The week that Tony opens in Canada, he begins shooting his next feature, a journalism thriller set in Toronto, made with his long-time friends. At the same time, the director is deep into development on a massive adaptation of the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering for Legendary Entertainment, the production company behind Denis Villeneuve\u2019s Dune trilogy. (Incidentally, Johnson is working on the project with a number of Villeneuve\u2019s associates, including storyboard artist and fellow Torontonian Sam Hudecki.) <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m about to make this gigantic movie in God knows what country, so there\u2019s a perspective on this movie about Anthony Bourdain that is: I needed to crash-land in the American system and figure it out on the fly there so I didn\u2019t have to do it on Magic, because that would have been a true disaster,\u201d Johnson says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas that my plan? I don\u2019t know. I know when I realized I was putting myself into a system with all strangers in America, if it worked, then I\u2019d likely be making Magic. And if it didn\u2019t, then I\u2019d be making movies with my friends in Toronto for the rest of my life. Either outcome, I was happy with.\u201d <\/p>\n

Tony opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver Aug. 14, expanding across the country Aug. 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Dominic Sessa and Matt Johnson on the set of Tony, a biopic about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":854225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[901,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,361,46,549,75,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-854224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-alberta","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-celebrities","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-entertainment","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}