How Dominic Sessa Becomes Anthony Bourdain in A24's New Coming

While playing a teenaged version of Anthony Bourdain in the new film Tony, Dominic Sessa is meant to appear out of his depth. We first see him as a college freshman, swaggering around the Vassar campus with a sword tucked into his jeans, arrogantly declaiming the supposed stupidity of his professors; he fails out of their classes. Once installed in the humbling dish station of a Provincetown seafood restaurant, where he makes a series of humiliating mistakes, it becomes blisteringly obvious that young Tony has never wielded anything sharper than his own tongue. Sessa, meanwhile, already knew his way around a dish station, a professional stand mixer, an industrial deep fryer and a large-scale oven. “I worked summers at Cathy’s 14th Street Bakery in Ocean City [New Jersey],” Sessa says. “I started out at 13, washing dishes, and then [owner] Cathy [Greene] taught me how to mix the doughnut dough, how to cut the doughnuts, fry them and ice them, and eventually how to make croissants.” “He was a very quick learner and hard worker,” says Greene, who trusted him with opening the bakery by himself at 4:30 a.m. to prep for the morning rush. “One time I put the wrong dough mix in the bowl,” Sessa recalls with a self-conscious laugh. “There was too much yeast in it. I turned around and it had become this massive dough monster, spilling out of the machine. I had 20 minutes until Cathy got there, so I put it all into the outdoor trash cans. I thought I’d gotten away with it, but when she went outside to throw something out, the dough had expanded five times more, exploding out of the cans, and I had to admit what I’d done. She said, ‘I would have been much less disappointed if you’d just told me, and we could have fixed the problem. Now my trash cans are destroyed.’ Cathy taught me that it was okay to make mistakes, as long as I didn't lie about it.” It’s no spoiler to say that the through line of Tony, the film, a biopic nestled within a sweet summer coming-of-age story, is young Bourdain’s complicated relationship with honesty. He was, by his own description in his memoir-in-essays, Kitchen Confidential, “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” and his inability to tell the truth gets him literally and figuratively bashed around for much of the movie. He lies to his family, his boss, and his love interest about his skills and his motivations, realizing after a series of cinematic disasters that only the truth will help him become who he is meant to be. In addition to their unmistakable physical resemblance to each other, there are similarities between Bourdain’s and Sessa’s circuitous lives. Bourdain stumbled out of an ill-fated college career and into the Culinary Institute of America after that formative Provincetown summer. Writing Kitchen Confidential, he expected to entertain no more than a few dozen of his chef and cook friends, but it positioned him to become a beloved literary and travel television star, first on A Cook’s Tour, then on No Reservations, and finally, Parts Unknown. As a teen, Dominic Sessa believed he was meant to be a hockey-playing New England boarding school student. He earned a scholarship to the prestigious Deerfield Academy and a place on the school’s team, only to snap his femur in a preseason skateboarding accident. He pivoted to the school’s theater department, taking on the role of the power-mad king Creon in a production of Antigone. “I almost didn’t do it, because I didn’t want a big role,” Sessa says. “I was so nervous. I distinctly remember I was not the best hockey player. I was always jealous of the kids who scored goals every game. It makes you really fucking cool. When I did Antigone, people came up to me after, telling me I was doing something that they wanted to do but didn’t have the courage. That was power. It changed my life.” A few years later a casting agent took Sessa to director Alexander Payne, who chose him to play the lead role opposite Paul Giamatti in the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 2023 film The Holdovers. In working with screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe to bring the Tony story to life, director Matt Johnson, whose previous works include Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025) and BlackBerry (2023), capitalized on the parallels between Sessa’s and Bourdain’s paths. “Dom being from New Jersey, his relationship to education, his relationship to a kind of newfound fame that had just discovered him–it ambushed him,” Johnson says. “The persona that I’m interested in showing is a young man trying desperately to seem like an adult. Dom is the reason I made the movie.” Sessa developed a true fondness for Provincetown while making the film. “When I’m in my 80s, I want to have an old beach house there,” he says. “It’s really magical and so well-preserved, it’s kind of insane the place still exists. You can imagine that it’s still 1975 when you’re there.” Like many young New Yorkers, Sessa rarely cooks for himself thanks to a busy schedule and an oven he thought was broken until a friend recently baked cookies in it, but he frequents downtown Manhattan spots 7th Street Burger, Cafe Mogador (Moroccan), Miss Lily’s 7A (Jamaican), Ayat (Palestinian). Before departing for the Cape Cod set in summer 2025, he prepared for the role in Prospect Park, spending time in the kitchen at the bistro Gertrude’s alongside chef-partner Eli Sussman, who taught him how to shuck oysters and how a cook moves with speed and efficiency around a busy kitchen during service. “At a bakery, you make everything and then you put them out. The pace is a lot different in a restaurant,” Sessa says. “Eli introduced me to restaurant owners in New York. I hung out with them so I could understand that world. You really have to love it and have a passion for it.” Although the film ends just as Bourdain is on the cusp of starting his culinary education, Sessa says that his deep dive into the reality of the restaurant business helped him understand the fullness of the chef and author’s character. “I think what a lot of people forget, or lose sight of, is the fact that Tony was a calculated professional,” he says. “You want to see him as this rebellious, drinking, smoking, globe-trotting kind of guy, but at the end of the day, he ran restaurant kitchens very effectively, which is a really difficult thing to do. There are two sides: he’s this cool guy, but he’s also a very professional, capable person. That’s the dichotomy of his life. It’s both chaos and control.”