A24 is making a movie about the celebrity chef whose travels made us fall in love with the world

A24 is reportedly setting the table for an intimate new biopic about a man who changed the way we see food, travel, and humanity. The Holdovers breakout star Dominic Sessa has signed on to portray a young Anthony Bourdain in the upcoming film Tony, with Antonio Banderas also attached in a still-undisclosed role.

Directed by Matt Johnson (BlackBerry), with production expected to begin next month, Tony will rewind the clock back to 1976, to a formative summer that Bourdain spent in Provincetown, Mass. At that point in his life, he’d yet to enroll in culinary school, but the spark was already there. Just two years after the events the A24 film will depict, he’d begin his formal culinary education — eventually rising to fame as the executive chef of New York’s Brasserie Les Halles and the author of the groundbreaking memoir Kitchen Confidential.

That book, of course, wasn’t just a bestseller; it kicked the kitchen doors wide open and revealed the chaos, poetry, and grit behind the scenes. And Bourdain’s legacy only grew from there.

Through his Emmy-winning series No Reservations and Parts Unknown, he didn’t just tell stories about food — he captured the soul of places most of us will never go, and made us care deeply about the people who live there. When he died in 2018 in France at the age of 61, the world mourned not just a chef or a host, but a connector of cultures. He was a humanist with a fork and a passport.

Bourdain didn’t hopscotch the world like a tourist. He traveled to listen. In street markets, roadside stalls,  war zones, and five-star kitchens, he sat down with celebrities and ordinary people alike, giving them all the microphone. His genius was in how he made you feel like you were there beside him, knees tucked under a table, sharing something simple and sacred with someone you’d never meet again.

That’s one of many reasons his fans, like me, couldn’t be more excited to see what A24 comes up with here. There was also a poetry to the way Bourdain spoke about food, loneliness, joy, addiction, and the wider world. His voice was gravelly, unpolished, and often tinged with melancholy, the way Tom Waits might sound telling us a story. That same voice could light up when faced with a steaming bowl of noodles, a particularly well-poured glass of something strong, or a quiet conversation with a local in a village somewhere far from home. 

“If I’m an advocate for anything,” Bourdain once said, “it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody.”