Over six years after his death, the Anthony Bourdain entertainment complex continues apace. There have been books and documentaries and a whole day dedicated to unpacking the life of a man who had a profound and powerful impact on the food world. His own books are being republished and spun off into other media. And now, perhaps inevitably, we have an Anthony Bourdain biopic in the works.
Who’s making the newest Bourdain movie?
According to Deadline, production studio A24 is in talks to acquire the film, dubbed Tony, from production company Star Thrower Entertainment. Matt Johnson, who directed BlackBerry, is in talks to direct, and Dominic Sessa, who you might remember as the kid from The Holdovers, is attached to star as Bourdain, probably because audiences know he can do the gangly, personable-but-depressed kid from the ’70s thing.
Deadline says it’s unclear what period of Bourdain’s life the biopic will cover, though Sessa’s presence probably means a younger Bourdain will at least make an appearance. If there’s room for an older Bourdain, I hope Eric Bogosian is getting a phone call.
The script is written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, whose IMDB pages are relatively sparse. However, Bartels purports to be a restaurant fan, and has written a pilot about New York’s restaurant scene in the ’90s. As of now, it’s unclear what role those closest to Bourdain may have in the film.
How have Bourdain’s friends, family, and fans reacted?
Bourdain’s biographer Laurie Woolever has not yet said anything publicly about the film, and neither has his widow, Ottavia Bourdain, who has previously been vocal about her involvement — or lack thereof — in works about him. In 2021, Roadrunner director Morgan Neville said he had the blessing of the estate to use AI to mimic Bourdain’s voice in the documentary, but Ottavia publicly claimed she never signed off on it.
Roadrunner, which Woolever consulted on, also came under fire from critics. Marya E. Gates said the film felt “less like a loving tribute to a man no one ever fully knew, and more like vultures picking the last meat off his bones,” the latest in a line of attempts to cash in on his name. And online, after the news of the A24 film broke, some fans confidently posted that there are hundreds of hours of television of the man speaking in his own words, and that Bourdain would not have loved that there was a movie being made about him.
The “why watch a biopic when you could watch No Reservations?” argument is a little facile. A fictionalized film and a documentary TV series are different media with different goals. After all, why watch Dracula when you could read Bram Stoker? Why watch Walk The Line when you could listen to a Johnny Cash album? It’s just not the same thing.
It’s also impossible to know what Bourdain’s response to the film would be — the majority of us did not know him personally, and even those who did probably can’t know for sure. But we can glean from his persona and his works that he had a complicated relationship with the spotlight; it’s not hard to imagine that he would have found the near deification he’s receiving in his death, at best, lightly absurd.
