‘Sometimes when you’re young, it’s to your detriment that you don’t allow yourself to fail in a productive way’ … Sessa. Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Sometimes when you’re young, it’s to your detriment that you don’t allow yourself to fail in a productive way’ … Sessa. Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian Film Interview ‘These cooks ripped each other apart’: Dominic Sessa on playing Anthony Bourdain, kitchen bullies and the joys of being a 70s barfly Ryan Gilbey After his breakthrough in The Holdovers in 2023, Sessa has gone back to the 70s again for Tony, the biopic of bad-boy chef and Kitchen Confidential author Bourdain. And, he says, a big part of him would like to stay there
Prefer the Guardian on Google D espite being just 23, Dominic Sessa is perhaps as intimately acquainted with the 1970s as those who grew up then. Although the New Jersey-born actor has only starred in five films, two of them are marinated in the fashions, sounds and mores of the decade. In his new movie, Tony , he plays the 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, future bad-boy celebrity chef, bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential and host of its hit TV spin-off. Tony restricts itself to one summer in 1975, when Bourdain bummed around the coastal resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts, falling in love, scrubbing pans in a seafood joint and catching the cooking bug. “For a rootless young man with sensualist inclinations,” he wrote, “it was the perfect getaway.”
A 70s retro vibe also hung over Sessa’s debut film. In Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning 2023 comedy-drama The Holdovers , he played Angus Tully, a surly student forced to board at school over Christmas with only his classics teacher and the cook for company. That picture wasn’t merely set in 1970; it seemed, with its faded palette and fake crackles on the print, to have been made then.
The most convincing period touch in each film, however, is Sessa himself. He has been described as having a “1970s face”, a euphemism for “unconventional”. His crown of dark, jumbled curls looks as if it was scribbled in crayon by a hyperactive child, while his wide, narrowed eyes are set high and far apart in his upside down triangular face. He projects inner conflict: when Tony and Angus behave arrogantly and disagreeably, even aggressively, Sessa’s features suggest a wounded quality that hints at future self-disgust for any misdeeds.
Sessa was barely aware of Bourdain before making Tony. “I knew of him but he didn’t have any significant meaning for me,” he shrugs, speaking over video call from a Manhattan hotel room. A gangly six-footer, Sessa is all elbows, collar-bones and sharp edges as he stares down the webcam in a brown-and-white checked shirt. “I think the only way to do the film honestly and without hesitation was to not have a strong opinion about him.”
Now that he has been immersed in Bourdain’s history, he has clearer ideas about the pioneering chef’s appeal. “I think he made people feel an overwhelming sense of potential in themselves,” he says. “He inspired this movement where there’s hundreds, probably thousands, of YouTube channels by people who dedicate their lives to showcasing what’s being eaten in different parts of the world. He was a rebellious person, someone who acted with integrity.”
Tony’s director Matt Johnson, who brought such vitality to the tech origin story Blackberry and the recent time-travel comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie , pointed Sessa…