Unless you live inside an underground cave, you’ve likely heard the term ‘method-acting’ before. It’s when an actor commits. Really commits. See Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrayed beardy US president Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winner – and didn’t break character for the entire eight-week shoot. Or when Austin Butler, having honed Elvis’ soupy Southern drawl to the point of uh huh huh-induced insanity, forgot how to speak in his own accent. The goal, method actors say, is not to play the part but to become the part. For new biopic Tony, about late, bad boy TV chef Anthony Bourdain, Dominic Sessa went one better – he made the part become him.
“I looked at his story through the scope of my personal experiences,” the 23-year-old rising star says, zooming into NME’s London office from his Los Angeles hotel room 5,000 miles away. He’s wearing a blue-and-white striped tee, paired with a faded blue baseball cap perched on top of his unruly dark brown curls; all of which exudes a very 1970s, Bourdain-like vibe. If you’ve ever glimpsed the iconic cover photo adorning most copies of Kitchen Confidential, the best-selling sex-drugs-and-haute-cuisine memoir upon which Tony is based, you’ll know what we’re talking about.
“I thought about my views and feelings about the world,” Sessa continues, “the people around me and my mentors – and I asked: where does [my life] align with his?” Later, director Matt Johnson will tell us on the phone that “every line in the script” draws from something that actually happened to Sessa. “If he didn’t think [a scene] was true to him, we just didn’t do it.”
See, Tony isn’t a text-accurate profile – painstakingly checking off rote reimaginings of Bourdain’s escapades. It takes a looser, appropriately rock and roll, approach to the details. And since the script was “written about Dom”, Johnson adds, “the collaboration was total”.
They decided to focus on two early chapters, embellishing the 19 pages of gonzo journalism with fictional additions to fashion one compelling summer spent by the sea in 1975. At the start of the film, 19-year-old Tony (never Anthony) washes up in Provincetown, a coastal resort at the tip of Cape Cod where his fellow college kids come to let loose in the sunny months. Imagine bustling wooden jetties, bottles of beer on the beach and long, packed streets lined with dive bars and tiny seafood joints.
Self-described by Bourdain as “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout”, Tony isn’t here with mates. He has none. What he does have is the hots for high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones), who unwittingly mentioned she’d be vacationing in P-Town. Creepily, it must be argued, Tony has followed alone. But what starts out as a romantic misadventure soon becomes the defining juncture in this cook’s tale when he gets a job scrubbing pots at rickety bistro The Flagship and discovers the flour-and-cocaine-dusted countertops of the sordid kitchen industry.
“I wasn’t the best-behaved kid. I was constantly breaking rules”
“There’s a lot of people [that he met] who still live there,” says Sessa, “such as the pizza shop [where Nancy works in the film], called Spiritus Pizza.” Bourdain used to kip in the apartment above Spiritus – and Sessa confirms the same family still owns the place. “They all remember meeting him. And then this one restaurant, Ciro & Sal’s… They had some crazy stories…”
A great deal of these stories make their way into Tony. Our scrawny, sideburned protagonist smokes weed, snorts drugs, crashes parties and gets into fights with locals – all aided by several sculleries’ worth of near-piratical outlaw colleagues whom Bourdain painted as “looting, pillaging and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality.” In one entertaining sequence, self-destructive oyster-shucker Sal (played with a roguish wink by The White Lotus’ Leo Woodall) serves wedding breakfast to a beaming happy couple. Then, in the next, he plates up an altogether more intimate course for the blushing bride as family, friends and freshly-anointed hubby carry on none-the-wiser across the road.
Other memorable comrades include Baltimore comedian Stavros Halkias’ loud-mouthed lobster expert and The Flagship’s fatherly proprietor – played by a cuddly Antonio Banderas. Nearly all are reworked versions of culinary reprobates we’ve previously met in Kitchen Confidential. Surprisingly, given Sessa and Johnson’s self-referential approach, the most similar to his book persona is probably Tony. And after speaking with Sessa, slowly learning his history, we’ve realised it’s because they have a remarkable amount in common.
For starters, they both grew up in Noo Joi-zee, the home of disco fries, Bruce Springsteen and shouting at your neighbour. Bourdain even summered in Sessa’s idyllic coastal hometown of Ocean City. And just like the punky food-lover, Sessa was a smart lad who knew how to have fun.
“I wasn’t the best-behaved kid. I was constantly breaking rules, sneaking out and stuff like that,” he says. “I grew up on the shore, which was heaven to me and my friends. It was that time in our lives, being 16 or 17 years old and figuring out how to get alcohol to drink on the beach.” In the holidays, Sessa worked early morning shifts at a local bakery for booze money – arriving at 4AM after a blurry night on the slopes and slogging through until 10AM when he would “go home, sleep, wake up and have the best time of my life again.”
As Bourdain also did, Sessa went to “a preppy, high-intensity school” where everyone was encouraged to study their “ass off” to get into a good college. Initially accepted on a scholarship with plans to play ice hockey, he pivoted to theatre after a nasty leg-break during freshman pre-season. This proved fortuitous when movie scouts turned up at Deerfield Academy to conduct open auditions in 2021. Suddenly, Sessa was cast in his first film role. His first ever role, really.
“It’s easy, sometimes, to let the tragic aspects of Anthony Bourdain’s life overshadow everything”
You’ve probably heard of The Holdovers. It’s the kind of heartwarming drama about wayward youths and their older, shrewder minders that usually does well with Oscars voters. And boy, did it do well. Nominated for five Academy awards, including for Best Picture, the sympathetic account of a curmudgeonly teacher who forms an unlikely bond with Sessa’s smart alec troublemaker marked him out as a major new talent before he’d considered whether he wanted to be one. “It was a dream come true to have that opportunity,” he says, careful not to sound ungrateful. “But at the same time, there was this moment where I was like: ‘Oh shit, this is gonna be fucking terrifying… is this the right thing to do?’”
For the first month of shooting, Sessa says he barely spoke when not on camera. Gradually, he learned to ask questions, solicit advice from veteran actor Paul Giamatti and build confidence from small successes. “It was scary to be in that many scenes,” he says, “but [I treated it like] a voluntary hardship, you know, making the choice to do something that you know is going to be hard but – if you just get through it – will change your life forever.”
There are clear comparisons to be drawn here. At an identical age, 19, Sessa was dropped into a fast-paced environment he’d never known where one mistake can cost thousands of dollars; while Bourdain’s slightest fuck-up amid red-hot pans and razor-sharp knives provided his gastronomic comrades yet more opportunity to rain down curses upon him at the drop of a toque blanche.
But it’s not just a shared baptism of fire that makes Sessa so believable as Bourdain. During our conversation, he talks in the familiar blunt New Yorker tone that Bourdain used when stating a fact so obvious even a wet-behind-the-ears junior line cook could understand. Occasionally, his face will split into a clumsy grin and a honking laugh erupts. Sessa doesn’t ooze Bourdain’s affable charm yet, but he has the same subtle goofiness beneath the surface that endeared millions to the globe-trotting gourmet.
One topic Tony doesn’t touch on – and which Sessa has understandably skirted around in interviews – is the heartbreaking end Bourdain came to. At 61, during a long production stint abroad, he died by suicide in his Kaysersberg hotel room. For many fans, this knowledge may colour their enjoyment of the film. What message would Sessa send to them?
“It wasn’t something that we were thinking about when making the movie,” he explains. “He was a symbol of hope – and I think that’s why people loved him and connected with him. It’s easy, sometimes, to let the tragic aspects of his life overshadow everything. I think, if anything, this film should be a reminder that his story is not a tragedy. There were tragic aspects to it and a tragic ending, but in total I think it was a life of hope.”
‘Tony’ is in UK cinemas from August 14