Dominic Sessa Plays Young Anthony Bourdain Like He Has No Idea Who He'll Become

Dominic Sessa spent the two years after his breakout in The Holdovers deliberately avoiding leading roles. “I was offered these big projects where I'd be number one on the call sheet,” he says. “My priority was: get on another set, surround yourself with as many great actors as you can, but don't be the face of the project.” That stretch produced supporting parts in films like Tow and Now You See Me: Now You Don't. Now, at 23, he's back at the center of a film, and the part carries more weight than most: a teenage Anthony Bourdain in the A24 biopic Tony.

The film, directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, skips the version of Bourdain most people remember — the globe-trotting host of Parts Unknown — for a directionless college kid finding purpose in the kitchen of a Provincetown, Massachusetts seafood restaurant in the mid-1970s, drawn from two chapters of Bourdain's memoir Kitchen Confidential. Johnson says the fact that neither he nor Sessa had much personal attachment to Bourdain as a cultural icon ended up working in the film's favor. “We both had a strident lack of interest in Anthony Bourdain,” he says. “Because we didn't view him as a role model, it let us look at the character as somebody who could be influenced by others.”

Sessa carries nearly the entire film. “I'm in every shot, basically,” he says, describing a camera that stays locked to Bourdain's perspective throughout, even as heavyweight supporting turns from Antonio Banderas, Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias fill out the kitchen around him. Banderas, who plays the chef who takes young Bourdain under his wing, says he saw the performance click immediately: “He understood the complexity of the character, and he didn't even play it — he lived it during the time we were shooting in Cape Cod.”

Sessa's own path to the role has quieter parallels to Bourdain's. He grew up in southern New Jersey, lost his father suddenly at 14, and landed at Deerfield Academy on a hockey scholarship before a career-ending femur injury pushed him toward the school's theater program instead — where he was cast in The Holdovers during his senior year. He describes the emotional territory of Tony in terms that could apply just as easily to his own twenties: “You tell yourself and other people things that aren't true to feel respected and important. And then ultimately you learn that you can't actually be important or reach your potential unless you're honest with yourself. And the kitchen was the place where Bourdain learned that.”

He's already looking past the run of period coming-of-age roles that built his career so far. “I'm kind of done with the '70s,” he says, laughing, before rattling off what he'd want to try next: a horror movie, a costume drama, Broadway, even a shot at playing Jason Todd in a DC film. In the meantime, he's just wrapped an indie crime drama, Shades of Paradise, shot in Barcelona — a role he took partly to learn how to stunt-drive a manual car.