A24 released the first trailer for Tony on May 5, offering the first look at a young Anthony Bourdain before he became a chef, memoirist and television host. Directed by Matt Johnson, the film opens on a 19-year-old Bourdain in the summer of 1975, after a writing fellowship rejection sends him to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he stumbles into work at a seafood restaurant.
Dominic Sessa plays Bourdain, while Antonio Banderas appears as the head chef who takes him under his wing. Emilia Jones, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rich Sommer, Stavros Halkias and Leo Woodall also appear in the cast. The setup gives the project a narrower focus than a standard life story, following one summer that the estate says helped shape him.
Johnson arrives on the project with a growing profile built on his third feature Blackberry and his work on the web series Nirvana the Band the Show, along with its recent film spinoff. Tony keeps the frame tight: it follows Bourdain before Kitchen Confidential and long before the travel shows that made him a global figure.
Bourdain’s estate said it backed the film because it is not a standard biopic and does not try to sum up a life. In its words, the movie depicts one transformative summer in Provincetown and is an interpretation of a period that will always remain somewhat unknown. That leaves the production with a built-in tension: it is telling the story of a man known for sharp detail and candor, while acknowledging that the version on screen can only fill in part of the blank.
A24 will release Tony in theaters this August, giving audiences a chance to see how the film imagines the summer that preceded the rest of Anthony Bourdain’s public life. The trailer suggests the movie is less interested in completing the legend than in showing the moment before it started.
