Inside ‘Tony,’ the A24 Movie About the Provincetown Summers That Made Anthony Bourdain
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- A24's 'Tony' stars 'The Holdovers' breakout Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain arriving in Provincetown circa 1975, with Antonio Banderas, Stavros Halkias, and Leo Woodall rounding out the cast.
- Director Matt Johnson co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe, condensing three years of Bourdain's Provincetown summers — including stints at the Lobster Pot and Ciro & Sal's — into a single-summer narrative adapted from Bourdain's 2000 memoir 'Kitchen Confidential.'
- 'Tony' shot on location in Provincetown for only five of its 25 shooting days, and Woodall quipped at the festival panel that 'one week in P-Town for me nearly stole my soul.'
- Sessa, in his first time portraying a real person, said he was initially 'weary' of biopics but was drawn to the project's agency; Johnson revealed he actively discouraged research, telling the New Jersey-born actor 'I didn't want him to do an impression' and 'I didn't want him to be conscious of…pronounce things like this.'
- Woodall, who plays a Ciro & Sal's worker, said his sole kitchen preparation was learning to shuck oysters — and he impaled his hand on day four of shooting.
- Johnson, fresh off the critically hailed 'Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,' is in post-production on 'Tony,' which opens in theaters August 7.
Why it matters: A24 handing its Bourdain biopic to the director of 'BlackBerry' is a tonal curveball: Johnson built the film around a deliberately anti-biopic approach, refusing to let Sessa research the role or attempt an impression, and explicitly framing the project as an interrogation of which parts of Bourdain's self-reported 'Kitchen Confidential' memoir are lionized versus minimized.
