Bourdain in bio

Becca Schuh speculates whether A24 can capture all sides of Anthony Bourdain.

I remember, as a child, experiencing the early iterations of Anthony Bourdain’s media empire; sitting in our family living room while my mom watched the first season or two of A Cook’s Tour. Instead of paying attention, I was drawing: cartoons of Bourdain and whoever his sidekick of the week was. We kept them for a long time, long enough that I can picture Bourdain becoming a triangular head with big sunglasses atop a tiny body, a short mafioso type next to him.

I thought about this a lot while I was working on my recent piece about Bourdain for the New York Times Magazine—how even as a child, I was drawing images of Bourdain, a kind of proto-meme. How he was already in the process of becoming an image, and I was already latching onto studying public figures. We are who we become long before we realize it.

The news of a Bourdain film doesn’t come as a surprise. People long for his presence, and in the world of figure-worship, nothing purports to fill that longing like a man portraying another man on screen. Well, probably not, but, we’ll see. Produced by A24 and titled Tony, the film will star Dominic Sessa as the late chef, writer, raconteur, activist—a wearer of far too many hats.

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It’s hard to imagine anyone playing Anthony Bourdain. Even in the side-by-side photos from the Deadline announcement, Sessa glowers while Tony’s eyes are warm and kind. But skepticism aside, I do think there’s a fighting chance that they can make a good movie, if they choose to do it right. 

It brings to mind this year’s Amy Winehouse biopic, wherein similarly mid-breakout star Marisa Abela was tasked with depicting a lost icon, though the results are not a promising blueprint. Back to Black has a dismal 35% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and didn’t get much attention in the way of reviews from major publications. Biopics are a tough business, especially when the subject is a capital-T Tragic Figure. 

Though past Bourdainian adaptations have largely failed—there’s a reason you don’t know that Bradley Cooper played him in a sitcom adaptation of Kitchen Confidential—a full-scale biopic of a deceased star exists in a different class. We’re now in the realm of trying to resuscitate a person and create a digital shrine, a much more ambitious and emotional project than capturing a kitchen punk’s real-time talking edge. The stakes are higher with a biopic—whether it succeeds or fails, Tony won’t be so easily memory-holed. And someone is going to want to go for the Oscar.

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