Dominic Sessa Stars as Young Bourdain in 'Tony'
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- 'Tony' is Matt Johnson's drama about Anthony Bourdain's 1975 summer in Provincetown, based on early chapters of 'Kitchen Confidential' and framed as the origin story of how the future celebrity chef became a writer
- Dominic Sessa plays the young Tony, with the reviewer writing that he 'has the goods' and delivers the moment 'when you see an actor become a movie star' — a step beyond his 2023 'The Holdovers' breakout
- Antonio Banderas co-stars as Chef, the restaurant owner who gives Tony a job washing dishes and a hammock to sleep in, in what the reviewer calls 'a fantastic performance' blending gentleness with cutthroat authority
- Emilia Jones plays Nancy, the object of Tony's summer obsession, with the film structured as a romance even as Tony is drawn deeper into the kitchen life at the Flagship seafood restaurant
- The kitchen scenes are staged with 'an existential, at times violent spontaneity' that the reviewer suggests surpasses the kitchen realism of FX's 'The Bear'
- Stavros Halkias and Leo Woodall round out the Flagship crew as burnout dishwasher Stavros and aggressive ladies' man Sal, while Dagmara Domińczyk plays Tony's intellectual, exacting mother Gladys
Why it matters: For indie distributor A24 and any awards campaign around 'Tony,' Sessa's performance is the commercial asset: the reviewer explicitly positions him as a future movie star, which matters more than the source film's modest setting. The piece also reframes the Bourdain biopic not as a chef origin story but as a writer's awakening — a useful framing for producers pitching the project to literary audiences.
