Anthony Bourdain was a beloved culinary icon known for his deep humanity and humor. But the new “Tony” movie shows his destructive side as a young man.
Anthony Bourdain’s close friends reveal best advice, favorite memories
At the premiere for the biopic “Tony,” chefs Marcus Samuelsson and Eric Ripert reveal the best advice they received from the late chef and TV host.
Spoiler alert! We’re discussing minor details about the plot of the Anthony Bourdain biopic “Tony.” Stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie yet and don’t want to know what happens.
To many, Anthony Bourdain is the patron saint of the culinary underground.
Through his TV series “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” the celebrity chef thoughtfully introduced viewers to diverse cultures and cuisines, all with his trademark curiosity and disarming wit. But his gregarious public persona masked a quietly tortured individual who struggled with depression and substance abuse for decades, and died by suicide in 2018 at age 61.
A new film is attempting to reckon with some of his sharper edges: “Tony” (in select theaters now, nationwide Aug. 21) follows a college-age Bourdain (played by Dominic Sessa) as he runs off to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the mid-1970s. Upon arrival, he begrudgingly takes a summer job as a dishwasher at a seafood restaurant to pay the bills.
Directed by Matt Johnson, the movie unflinchingly depicts a Bourdain that none of us ever saw on television: a volatile, often petulant kid who gets thrown out of bars for being too drunk and making unwanted overtures toward women. Even at work, he’s quick to pick fights with his fellow kitchen staff, and he doesn’t think twice about stealing money from his boss (Antonio Banderas).
It’s a prickly portrayal that aligns with how Bourdain described himself in his 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.”
“He doesn’t pull any punches about what an angry little s— he was,” says Lou Howe, who co-wrote the screenplay with Todd Bartels. “That liberated us to paint a truthful, warts-and-all portrait of him as a young man. The driving idea was: How did (he) become this ambassador of empathy? He was known for his kindness and all these values we revere him for, but how did he get from point A to point B?”
Anthony Bourdain’s carefree persona was actually ‘a suit of armor’
Later in life, Bourdain spoke candidly about the emptiness and isolation of constantly being on the road, and in his 2010 memoir “Medium Raw,” he wrote that he was “aimless and regularly suicidal” after his 2005 divorce from wife Nancy Putkoski.
With the support of Bourdain’s estate, “Tony” very much imagines him as an irascible lone wolf who shuts himself off from his family and lies to Nancy (Emilia Jones), his then-love interest. Initially, he shirks his duties at the restaurant: pompously claiming he’s writing a novel and that washing dishes is beneath him. But gradually, he comes to see the fulfillment and community that food can foster.
“Tony” is loosely based on three chapters of “Kitchen Confidential,” but also pulls from several other interviews and books such as 2021’s “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography,” written by his former assistant Laurie Woolever.
In Woolever’s book, “his ex-wife, Nancy, and several of the chefs who knew him talk about this time in his life when he was a real wayward soul who treated the world like his ashtray,” Bartels says. “We posited that maybe in this summer, he grew from a selfish person and a narcissist to someone who was deeply interested in other people.”
Like any biopic, “Tony” takes liberties with Bourdain’s life. The movie fictionally suggests that Bourdain was rejected by a Vassar College writing fellowship, which prompted him to run away from home to Provincetown. The film also implies that his scorned, underdog spirit was spurred in part by his mom, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk). “Tony” depicts Gladys as an aloof and tough-to-please matriarch, when in actuality, she was her son’s biggest champion.
Throughout Bourdain’s life, “a lot of people would say he was effortlessly social and unbothered,” Johnson says. “What was interesting to me is that this reputation seemed to be a defensive persona he had created. Yes, he’s cool and seems ready for anything, but that must be an answer to something in his childhood: this suit of armor to protect him.”
The ‘Tony’ movie captures his ‘romantic’ view of drugs and alcohol
“Tony” also doesn’t shy away from Bourdain’s addictive behaviors, with numerous scenes of him drinking alone and snorting cocaine on the job. Johnson was particularly fascinated by the almost Hunter S. Thompson way that Bourdain wrote about his relationship to drugs.
In “Kitchen Confidential,” he fondly describes his Provincetown compatriots as “pirates” who had sex and booze in excess, and lived their lives with “a carefree disregard for all conventional morality.” He writes that they threw themselves into their kitchen chores, but always fueled by marijuana and “prodigious amounts of cocaine and amphetamines.”
For Bourdain, these were “tools of the chef’s trade and he loved being one of the guys that could use drugs to get through a shift,” Johnson says. “It felt very clearly like Anthony Bourdain’s romantic ideation around drug culture. He looked at those things as admirable and things that he wanted to chase.”
Bourdain didn’t start using heroin until the 1980s when he was working in New York restaurants. He developed a severe addiction to that and crack cocaine, and he eventually checked himself into rehab in the early 1990s. Although he remained sober from hard drugs for the rest of his life, he never quit alcohol, and one of his oft-repeated travel mantras was to “drink heavily with locals” whenever possible.
Through the pleasure-seeking fictional character of fry cook Sal (Leo Woodall), Johnson wanted to show the “double-edged” sword of Bourdain’s lifestyle: the thrill and comradery that partying provides, while also being enormously destructive to one’s physical and mental health.
“It’s Leo’s character who really expresses the cleanest Bourdain-ism: You’re on this planet once, so you should enjoy the ride,” Johnson says. “I mean, Bourdain’s famous line is: ‘Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park.’ There’s a positive and a negative in that message, which is what the film is trying to get at.”
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”