Antonio Banderas has joined the biopic of legendary chef Anthony Bourdain, titled Tony, currently in production at studio A24.
Dominic Sessa, who made his film debut in the Oscar-winning film The Holdovers, will play a young Bourdain in a story set in 1976, following him as he has a life-changing experience working and living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Variety reports that production is set to begin in May.
Anthony Bourdain rose in the culinary industry worked as a chef in Manhattan in the ‘90s. He gained notoriety for his writing on the secrets of the restaurant world, particularly his 2000 book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.
This led to a successful career as a documentary host of shows such as Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Parts Unknown. He was known for his no-nonsense attitude toward cuisine, as well as his philosophy on how food reflects on society as a whole. He died by suicide in 2018 while filming in France, aged 61.
Banderas’ role in the film is as yet unknown, but the film will be directed by Matt Johnson, who directed the tech biopic Blackberry in 2023.
This won’t be the first time a film about the late star has been made. In 2021, Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville made Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, following his life, career, opinions, and politics. While well-received by critics, it received criticism for using Artificial Intelligence to replicate Bourdain’s voice for some clips.
Neville explained the process in an interview with GQ. “We fed more than ten hours of Tony’s voice into an AI model,” he said. “The bigger the quantity, the better the result”.
According to Neville, the creative decision had been cleared by those closest to Bourdain. “I checked, you know, with his widow and his literary executor, just to make sure people were cool with that. And they were like, Tony would have been cool with that”.
Despite this approval, the move drew criticism from many online.