Dominic Sessa has what can only be called a punchable face. “That’s high praise,” the actor laughed.
It’s part of what makes him so perfect as the pre-fame, pre-humility, pre-intellectual curiosity version of Anthony Bourdain in biopic Tony. The film, which is in theatres now, concentrates on one of the most important yet enigmatic periods in Bourdain’s life: the summer he spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts, working in the kitchen of a local restaurant. However, while the future author and No Reservations host called it one of the most important times of his life, he was also somewhat reticent to talk about it, even changing the name of the diner from the Flagship to the Dreadnaught for his book, Kitchen Confidential. Sessa said, “He hated talking about that time in his life. He was intensely embarrassed by it, and can you blame him?”
That embarrassment and resulting obfuscation didn’t come from Bourdain hating the people around him. It was self-hatred of who he was, a pretentious teenage bore with nothing to back it up, and that’s the character that Sessa had to capture. “You see this person emerging and you go, ‘I want this person to get punched in the face.’ Then that happens and you go, ‘OK, we’re past that point now. What’s he going to do about it?’”
The filmmaker providing the guidance to Sessa on those next steps was Tony director Matt Johnson. With the recent release of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, the latest iteration of his long-running double act with Jay McCarrol, Johnson is finding new audiences as a comedian. But as a filmmaker, he’s normally leaned into darker fare like tech parable BlackBerry. In many ways, Tony harks back to his controversial debut feature, high school shooting drama The Dirties, in that it centers on the ugly inner lives of angry young men.
“I think he saw a lot of himself in me,” Sessa said. “When I met him, I was at a pretty angry stage in my life, honestly. I was angry at the world, I was angry about people around me, I so deeply wanted respect, and I wanted people to see what was right in the world and I was right about things, but I’d never done the work to prove that. I think he felt that same way as a young person, and he was the first person to really teach me to work with integrity. I think that, up until that point, I was always constantly working to pretend to be an adult. I wanted respect that I hadn’t earned, I wanted status that I hadn’t earned, and I think he saw that, and he almost saw me as someone that he could help. And he did. As much as Bourdain and this experience changed my life, I think Matt changed me as a person, and I am forever indebted to him for that.”
In the role of the chef who takes the surly young Bourdain on as a dish boy, Johnson cast Antonio Banderas, and for the young actor he was as initially daunting a scene partner as working with Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers. Sessa said, “I’ve always felt nervous, of course, working with these people and not knowing how they’re going to be when I meet them, if they’re going to want to talk to me. In the scenes, they are way smarter about things than I am, and are able to find things way easier than me a lot of the time, and I always have this fear of, ‘Am I just going to be left in the dust in this scene? They’re just gonna run with it, and I’m just gonna be there.’”
What he quickly discovered with both Giamatti and Banderas is that “they’re so unpretentious about how they work. I’ve never had an experience with either of these guys of coming into a scene and it’s been ‘OK, this is how it’s going to go. You’re going to say this and I’m going to do this.’ They asked me questions. I barely know what I’m doing, and they ask me what I think about the scene and what I feel and what’s happening to me when I hear this line. They approach it by asking questions, and that’s their process of discovering it, and what it does for someone like me, a young actor, it really opens me up and it makes me better and makes me more confident.”
Confidence was not something the young Bourdain was lacking when he arrived in Provincetown, and Tony is about his path to learning how unearned that swagger was. Such stories about the formative experiences of a beloved celebrity often make the mistake of having the central character be little more than a younger version of who they would become. By contrast, Tony is in essence about all the paths not taken as much as it is about who Bourdain would become because of that summer.
“It’s something I think about a lot of times with myself,” Sessa said. “This feels like a pretty unlikely outcome for me. I never thought, for most of my life, that I would be acting, let alone doing it on a movie screen. I think about the choice I made to go to boarding school when I was young and how if I’d never chosen to do that, I would be fucked right now. I would be such a messed-up person. And similarly in this, if he’d not made that decision, at least in the context of this story, it almost scares you to think what would have become of this person had they not had this experience, going to Provincetown, working in this kitchen, and being punched in the face by this realization.”
That starts with establishing Bourdain before that summer, and Tony shows him as pretty unlikable and egotistical. Sessa said, “In the beginning of the film, you see the way this person sees the world, and the way they plan to attack it – through deception, basically. If I can deceive the people around me, I can relate the reality that I want and be successful in that.”
Even at those low points, Sessa sees the film as asking the audience to remember what they were like when they were 19 and show both this version of Bourdain and their younger selves a little kindness. “To look at that time in your life is really difficult and takes a lot of mental fortitude,” Sessa said. “You’re like, ‘oh, shit, thank god I had this experience or whatever it was that changed things for me.’”
If both Sessa and Bourdain gained personal growth from that time in the kitchen, it’s also undeniable that Bourdain also picked up the basic essentials of how to be a chef. Sessa freely admitted that he didn’t pick up any extra culinary skills. “I learned how to hold a knife a little better, but after I cut myself in the first week, I think they stopped handing me sharp knives.” So can he cook at all? “Antonio Banderas taught me how to cook paella, but that’s not in the movie. … I can cook some things. Very basic things, but the only thing I learned how to do is shuck oysters. And I did get better at washing dishes.”
Tony is in theatres now. Read our review here.
