“Essentially, I treated the world as my ashtray,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his bestselling 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, the book that would eventually spur his television career. “Rudderless and unhappy, I went in with some friends on a summer share in Provincetown, Cape Cod.”
That exact summer—actually, a heavily fictionalized version of it—is the focus of Tony, a new A24 film starring The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain describes his college-age self as “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless.” Tony uses that line as an epigraph, setting up a story about Bourdain following his high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown in hopes of wooing her.
In real life, a young Bourdain found much more than romance in Ptown. “I left Provincetown with restaurant experience, a suntan, and an ever-deepening relationship with recreational drugs,” Bourdain said in a 2014 episode of Parts Unknown. “I went to culinary school, then to New York City, and never returned.”
Only a scant portion of Kitchen Confidential covers this time in Bourdain’s life. Tony sets out to capture Bourdain’s reckless summer on the coast more fully, though it’s certainly not a documentary. Director Matt Johnson and co-screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe cared most about getting the “vibe” of a young Bourdain right; the rest was up for creative license.
“When we were first thinking about Bourdain as a subject, it felt like there were three options for windows [into his life],” Howe tells Vanity Fair. The team had no interest in a traditional “cradle to grave” biopic; they also didn’t want to make a movie about his time working as a chef in New York. “We really thought that Tony deserved a movie that is as dynamic and entertaining as he was. The question of how that little shit became this sort of guru-like beacon of curiosity really drove us towards Provincetown. Everyone we met there who had spent time in the ’70s talked about how special and weird and magical those times were, so just being there really solidified that choice of, ‘We want to see how this angry little punk started to figure out the path towards enlightenment.’”
So they settled on making a film focused on one meaningful slice of Bourdain’s life. Tony is “a coming-of-age movie, a romance movie, a mentorship, a friendship, a ‘pirate ship’ movie,” says Bartels. (Bourdain loved to liken kitchen staff to a ragtag nautical crew.) “We were writing a love letter to Anthony Bourdain.”
Bourdain died by suicide at the age of 61 on June 8, 2018, while filming an episode of his CNN series Parts Unknown in France. His prolific television career and various books gave Tony’s team some source material. But his larger-than-life legacy also inspired them to take certain liberties, with the permission of Bourdain’s estate.
“Very early in the research process, we realized that the Kitchen Confidential chapters are Tony’s fictionalization of his own life,” explains Bartels. “Talking to other people and doing more research about those specific stories, so much of it was heightened and embellished and sharpened by Bourdain the writer to tell a good story. That liberated us to dig as deep as we could and do as much research as possible, but then take all those pieces and just write a good story.”
So, how much of Tony is literally true? Here’s a breakdown of which parts of the movie hew to fact—and which aspects are pure fiction.
Is Tony a biopic?
Not according to A24. The studio describes Tony as a fictionalized depiction of a portion of Bourdain’s life. Bartels goes a step further, calling Tony a reclamation of Bourdain’s media presence after his 2018 death.
“A couple of years ago, [Howe and I] were noticing that there was a lot of attention on the end of Anthony Bourdain’s life, the tragedy of the end of his life, and asking why he might have done that,” Bartels tells Vanity Fair. “No one will ever really know the answer to that. But we thought that maybe people were focusing on the wrong moment in his life. Instead of focusing on the end, we wanted to focus on the beginning, when he went to Provincetown for this life-changing summer and the seeds were planted that eventually grew over the course of his life. We wanted to know how and why he became such a beloved guru, and we had a sneaking suspicion that the answers might be in a clam shack on the tip of Cape Cod…. I think that it’s an unusual biopic in that it chooses an underknown and short window in a famous person’s life but we are not pulling punches. It is Anthony Bourdain in the beginning of the film. To his friends, he continued to be Tony.”
Bartels adds, “What was challenging was that there was very little written. But maybe what was freeing about it was that we could milk what was in these very few sources and expand them into something that is a story that works regardless of if it is about Anthony Bourdain, or [if] you know who Anthony Bourdain is.”
In the movie, young Tony goes to work at a seafood restaurant called The Flagship. Does that restaurant actually exist?
It’s closed now, but yes, Bourdain did have a dishwashing job at a Provincetown restaurant called The Flagship. He wrote about the restaurant in Kitchen Confidential, but in the book, he called it the “Dreadnaught.” His second year in Provincetown, Bourdain moved to another restaurant called Ciro & Sal’s; that restaurant does not appear in the film.
Did Bourdain really follow a crush to Provincetown?
No; he followed her to Vassar College. But she wasn’t just a crush. Nancy, Emilia Jones’s character in Tony, is based on Nancy Putkoski, Bourdain’s first wife.
Both in real life and in the film, Putkoski was a year older than Bourdain, and the two did attend northern New Jersey private high school Dwight-Englewood together. But Provincetown was not the province of their romance. In real life, Bourdain actually opted to graduate high school a year early to also attend Vassar alongside Putkoski, and the duo planned their trip to Provincetown together. In the film, Nancy tells Tony that she’s going to Provincetown for the summer; he impulsively goes there too after learning that he’s lost out on a writing fellowship.
This key fictionalization was a “good simplification to tell a more timeless story,” says Bartels. Howe describes Bourdain and Putkoski’s dynamic as being “on again, off again since high school.”
He says that the scenes between Tony and Nancy helped the team find the crux of the film. “Their dynamic and everything we read and heard from people is that they were really in love with each others’ brains, and that their banter was lightning fast and razor sharp. All those elements became the foundation of their relationship onscreen.”
What happened to Tony and Nancy?
Bourdain and Putkoski were married from 1985 to 2005. Bourdain told Daily Life in 2012 that Putkoski was his “partner in crime, my wife, and before that my girlfriend,” while also admitting to having a complicated relationship with her. “We went through a lot of times, many of them great, many of them bad,” Bourdain said.
Bourdain’s rising fame took a toll on their marriage and ultimately led to their divorce. Bourdain told The New Yorker in early 2017 that Putkoski “identified television early on as an existential threat to [our] marriage…She saw the whole thing as a cancer.”
Bourdain later got married to Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, with whom he had his only child, daughter Ariane Bourdain. The couple was still legally married when Bourdain died, but had been publicly estranged for years. At the time of his passing, Bourdain was romantically involved with Italian actress Asia Argento.
Busia-Bourdain was in contact with Tony’s screenwriters, according to Bartels. Putkoski has maintained a private life since her divorce from Bourdain.
Is Antonio Banderas’s character, Chef, based on a real boss Bourdain had?
Antonio Banderas’s role, referred to simply as Chef throughout the film, is based on a real mentor of Bourdain’s—the man he calls Bigfoot in Kitchen Confidential. “A lot of that DNA got into Antonio’s Chef character,” says Howe. Bigfoot did not directly refer Bourdain to the Culinary Institute of America, and we never learn his real name in the memoir, though fans have educated guesses about his true identity—but he did encourage Bourdain to pursue a career in the culinary arts. Bartel calls Banderas a “magical human being” whose performance as Chef is the “beating heart and soul of this film.”
Were young Bourdain’s fellow kitchen staff workers really that toxic and drug-addled?
Have you ever been in a working kitchen before? It makes The Bear look like summer camp. As Bartels puts it, paraphrasing Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain characterizes his cohort as “master criminals and sexual athletes. They were roguish renegades who had big gold hoop earrings and scrimshaw rings. [These were] guys who didn’t really have a whole lot of other options. They weren’t trying to then get a Food Network show, they were trying to make a living frying scrod and clams and oysters.”
There’s a scene in Tony in which coworker Sal (Leo Woodall) has an X-rated encounter with a bride while she’s celebrating her wedding day at the restaurant. That’s a reference to an infamous Kitchen Confidential scene, an incident Bourdain credited as the moment that made him begin to idolize chefs.
“We wanted polar influences on Tony, between Chef [Banderas] and Sal [Woodall]—like the angel and devil on his shoulder,” Howe says. “That was the fundamental idea of the movie. But it was really the actors that brought so much of themselves to make [those characters] feel like more than just symbols and amalgams of other real people.”
Johnson adds that Woodall’s Sal also represents Bourdain’s hedonistic side. Sal is “the pure aesthete half, the kind of guy who uses drugs, sex, and rock and roll to live life to the absolute fullest,” the director says. “If there’s somebody who is doing an impersonation, so to speak, Leo is much, much closer to that than what Dominic was, and for good reason. That was our plan.”
Did Bourdain really burn his hand on a cast iron pot?
Yes, and he wrote about sheepishly asking for burn cream afterwards in Kitchen Confidential too. “This is a movie about the very first time Anthony Bourdain ever goes into a kitchen. It’s the first time he ever really washes dishes. It’s the first time he ever really cooks anything,” Johnson tells Vanity Fair. “I was trying to protect Dom from overpreparing. One of my biggest jobs was to make sure that Dom did not become a certified oyster shucker or become extremely comfortable in a kitchen. I wanted those [cooking] scenes to be scary for him.”
And cooking in a restaurant is scary. “It’s totally intimidating and humbling to see the almost combat influences that a lot of these kitchen workers have, being around flames and knives and boiling liquids and having them just effortlessly glide from station to station before being perfectly arranged on a plate and being sent out to an unwitting diner who thinks, Oh, yes, wonderful, totally edible,” says Johnson. “It affected me the same way that it affected Bourdain: It’s a magic career, and we should all be grateful that people are willing to do it for us.
Was lobster thermidor really one of Bourdain’s most beloved dishes?
Well, no. There’s a big sequence in Tony where Tony pushes Chef to revitalize his restaurant by making lobster thermidor. That’s honestly an odd choice, since Bourdain seemed to have no affection for the dish: he called it a “fabulously unfashionable tyrannosaurus rex of seafood dishes” and an “ocean liner continental classic from days gone by” in an episode of Parts Unknown.
Was the Provincetown-wide clambake a real event?
The Tony team always knew that their film would end in a clambake. Bourdain wrote movingly about these communal experiences in Kitchen Confidential, saying they made a huge impact on him during his summer in Provincetown. Bartels says that chef Howard Mitcham, admired by Bourdain and author of The Provincetown Seafood Cookbook, really did throw an annual clambake for his group of artist pals and deemed it the “John J. Gaspie Memorial Clambake.” Obviously, there are parallels between Mitcham and Banderas’s Chef, who tells Tony wistfully about Provincetown’s clambakes—inspiring Tony and Sal to throw one.
“Anthony Bourdain’s superpower was bringing people together and listening to them and connecting people through food,” Bartels says. “The clambake symbolized that.”
Was Bourdain actually estranged from his parents?
Tony showcases a strained relationship between Tony and his parents, played by Dagmara Domińczyk and Rich Sommer. The late chef’s longtime literary agent Kim Witherspoon, who now coordinates his estate, is the one who told the Tony team that Bourdain had a complex dynamic with his “New Yorker-reading, bohemian, suburban New Jersey literary-minded” family, per Bartels. Bourdain’s father was French American and worked for record companies, while his mother was an editor at The New York Times.
“I think that that relationship was always complicated and we heard it continued to be, even in the end of Anthony’s life,” Bartels says. “His mom pushed him pretty hard. It’s hard to tell the chicken and egg of Anthony’s desire to be a great literary figure: Did that come from him, or did that come from his mother’s encouragement? But you know, I think a lot of extraordinary human beings have parents who have big aspirations for them. What we were trying to capture, as well as the tension between them, was something that he might want to run away from.”
Johnson echoes that the goal was to have the film “unfold like a storybook where you are turning the pages, as opposed to us pushing you through a narrative.” He likens Tony to Pinocchio—another movie where, as Johnson puts it, a “wooden boy goes to an island and lies to everybody in hopes of becoming a real person, and eventually does.”
Bourdain’s actual family does not seem to think Tony is something out of a fairytale. In a Bon Appétit feature written by Bourdain’s former assistant, the bestselling author Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s brother Chris talks about having an adverse reaction to an early screening of the film. “I’ve read about how it’s supposedly ‘a touching and heartwarming story,’” Chris told Bon Appétit. “What is it, Ratatouille meets The Karate Kid? If he were to ever hear such words associated with anything to do with him…I think Tony would have hated the entire idea of this film.”
Did Bourdain really drop out of Vassar to go to the Culinary Institute of America?
Yes. After attending Vassar for two years as an undergraduate, Bourdain dropped out to enroll in the CIA. He graduated in 1978.
Why is Eric Ripert in the film?
Eric Ripert, the visionary behind Le Bernardin, appears in the final scene of Tony as a CIA admissions officer. Ripert was famously a dear friend and collaborator of Bourdain’s; he is the person who found Bourdain in his hotel room when he died in 2018. Johnson says that Ripert was key to Tony. “I wanted Eric in the movie. I thought [the scene] was such a loving nod to the transition in Bourdain’s life, from kid to man.”
Bartels adds, “It felt a little bit like a stamp of approval from Anthony Bourdain’s real life and people who really knew him. Like Tony, Eric is one of our other heroes.”
What are we supposed to take away from Tony?
Scores of millennials still consider Bourdain to be synonymous with the curation of taste—an influencer from an age before social media existed. As Johnson puts it, audiences should hopefully “get something from it that gives them not a new sense of Anthony Bourdain, but a new sense of themselves”—perhaps just as Bourdain would have wanted.
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