"Taste of the future": the trailer of the biopic about the young Anthony Bourdain is published

Renowned chef Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018 in a hotel room in Strasbourg, France. He was 61. To millions of people, he was not just a chef or a TV presenter, but a voice capable of talking about oysters in slums, personal demons, and the taste of fried chicken in a Hanoi street eatery with ruthless directness. Six Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, bestsellers in dozens of languages — all this was the result of one summer in a small town on Cape Cod, where he arrived with nothing and left with a completely different person. It is about this summer that the new A24 studio biopic "Tony" tells, the trailer of which was released on May 5. About how the film works, who shot it, and why Bourdain's heirs called it an "interpretation" is in the Izvestia article.

The plot of the movie "Tony"

According to the plot of the film, 19-year-old Bourdain (Dominique Sessa) arrives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and finds himself in the chaotic world of restaurant cuisine, living through a summer that will change the entire course of his life. In the summer of 1974, Bourdain got a job washing dishes at a restaurant in Provincetown while still studying at Vassar College. There, in his own words, for the first time in his life he felt respect for the people with whom he worked side by side, and he wanted to earn it himself — although he had never felt anything like it before.

The experience turned out to be so defining that after his sophomore year, he dropped out of Vassar and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America. Bourdain graduated in 1978, after which he began working in New York City restaurant kitchens, including the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center.

In the trailer, young Bourdain is shown in the midst of a troubled career: he misses a writing scholarship and finds himself in the kitchen of a small seafood restaurant. Antonio Banderas played the role of Chief Ciro, under whom he begins to work. It is Ciro who teaches Bourdain how to open oysters, a scene that refers to one of the chief's main childhood memories: his first encounter with oysters on a family vacation in France.

The trailer ends with young Tony's remark, which has become the film's unspoken slogan: "If anyone asks, I'm not a writer, I work in the kitchen." The irony is that we know for sure that this is not true. And that it was this contradiction between the person he wanted to become and the one he ended up becoming that turned him into one of the most widely read authors of his time.

"About food: strictly confidential" and the path to world fame

Bourdain's first work was the novel Bone in the Throat, published in 1995, a culinary detective story that was noticed by critics but passed by a wide audience. The next novel, "Far Away on the Run" (Gone Bamboo, 1997), also failed to bring commercial success. Bourdain paid for his own tour to promote the book out of his pocket and returned to the chef's counter with nothing.

The turning point came in the late 1990s, when he struggled to get published. According to The New York Times, his mother Gladys, who worked as an editor and author at the time, gave her son's manuscript to Esther Fine, the wife of The New Yorker's editor—in-chief, David Remnick. Remnick published Bourdain's material in the magazine, launching his career and consolidating the straightforward tone that became his signature style.

The essay "Don't Read This Before Reading This" was published in The New Yorker in 1999. The publication became a sensation, and the book that grew out of it turned into an even bigger sensation — a mega-bestseller with a circulation of more than one million copies.

"About food: strictly confidential. Notes from the Culinary Underground" (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly) was published in 2000 and had the effect of an exploding grenade: the book is both a professional memoir and a look at the unattractive sides of the gourmet restaurant world, which the author describes as continuously unpleasant and dangerous, filled with people on the edge. Bourdain, in particular, warned readers not to order fish on Mondays and to be wary of well-done steaks. In 2018, after the death of the author, the book again topped the New York Times bestseller lists.

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In 2010, a sequel followed — "Meat with Blood" (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook). In between, Bourdain released the collection Dirty Bits (2006), the book Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach (2007), and the travel memoir Around the World. In Search of the perfect meal" (A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, 2001). A separate niche was occupied by the biographical essay Typhoid Mary and the cookbook Appetites.

Success "About food: strictly confidential. Notes from the culinary underground" opened the door to television for Bourdain. In January 2002, the first show "A Cook's Tour" was launched on the Food Network channel, which released 35 episodes. In July 2005, the Travel Channel aired the program Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, which ran for eight seasons and won several Emmy Awards. In 2013, Bourdain joined CNN with Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, his most ambitious and personal television project, which won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award. The last episode was released posthumously: Bourdain died during the filming of the twelfth season.

Directed by Matt Johnson: A Canadian rebel with a camera

Tony was directed by Canadian Matt Johnson, one of the most unconventional authors of his generation. A native of Toronto, born in 1985, he started with micro-budget mockumentaries: his debut film "The Dirties" (2013) with a production budget of $10,000 won the Slamdance festival. Johnson's early work was notable for its trademark blurring of the line between documentary and feature films, filming without notifying real people and dialogues written right on the set.

"Tony" is shot in fundamentally different conditions: the film's budget was about $15 million. Johnson's regular cameraman, Jared Raab, who defined the visual language of his previous works, is not involved in the project. According to the director himself, this radically changed the approach to shooting.

"No one was more upset about this than me," he said.

Nevertheless, Johnson remained faithful to his method of avoiding conventional biographical constructions. As noted, a typical biopic follows from "nothing" to the top and further to the fall. "Tony" deliberately abandons this scheme in favor of a chamber "slice of life" — a moment that later determined a person's fate.

What Bourdain's heirs say

The official position of Bourdain's heirs has become one of the key topics for discussion around the film. The boss's family publicly supported the project, however, with a fundamental caveat.

They noted that they appreciated the way Tony's personality was shown to be complex, his intellectual aspirations and conviction — qualities that eventually led him to different parts of the world and secured him the love of many people. They also expressed the hope that the painting would show the beginning of a man's journey, who for many became an example of how important it is to explore the world and ourselves.

When will the movie "Tony" be released

Tony will be released in August 2026. In addition to Sessa and Banderas, the cast includes British actress Emilia Jones, Dagmara Dominchik, Rich Sommer, comedian Stavros Halkias and British actor Leo Woodall. The screenplay was written by Matt Johnson in collaboration with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Hou.

Studio A24— a label that in recent years has turned smart cinema into a commercially viable genre ("Everything Everywhere at Once", "Past Lives"), takes up the story of how this man found himself. According to Empire, Bourdain was "a thrill seeker and a humanitarian who possessed the charisma of a rock star and an insatiable desire to try everything."