Antonio Banderas sits at the center of a new film conversation because Dominic Sessa is playing teenage Anthony Bourdain in Tony. The role leans on Sessa’s own kitchen experience, which gives the biopic a concrete edge instead of a generic coming-of-age gloss.
Sessa said, “I worked summers at Cathy’s 14th Street Bakery in Ocean City [New Jersey],” and added, “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.” That training matters here because Tony is built around work, repetition, and the small humiliations that shape a young cook.
Cathy Greene’s early shift
Cathy Greene said, “He was a very quick learner and hard worker,” and trusted Sessa to open the bakery by himself at 4:30 a.m. to prep for the morning rush. Sessa described a mistake that sounds like a rite of passage and a disaster at the same time: “One time I put the wrong dough mix in the bowl.” “There was too much yeast in it,” he said, and the dough “had become this massive dough monster, spilling out of the machine.”
He said he had “20 minutes until Cathy got there,” so he moved the dough into the outdoor trash cans, then watched it keep going. “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.” Greene’s reply — “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.” — is the kind of line that makes Sessa’s casting more legible: this is a performer who knows the difference between covering a mistake and owning it.
Young Tony at Vassar
In Tony, Sessa first appears as a college freshman on the Vassar campus with a sword tucked into his jeans, then fails out of his classes and lands in the dish station of a Provincetown seafood restaurant. That route tracks with Anthony Bourdain’s own self-description in Kitchen Confidential as “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
The film pushes that dishonesty into the plot: Bourdain lies to his family, his boss, and his love interest about his skills and motivations, and that inability to tell the truth gets him “literally and figuratively bashed around” for much of Tony. He later stumbled out of an ill-fated college career and into the Culinary Institute of America after his Provincetown summer, before Kitchen Confidential led to A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, and Parts Unknown.
Deerfield Academy and the cast
Sessa’s own path has its own break in it. As a teen, he believed he was meant to be a hockey-playing New England boarding school student, earned a scholarship to Deerfield Academy and a place on the school’s team, then snapped his femur in a preseason skate. That puts Tony in sharper focus: a player with a damaged sports career is portraying a teenager whose life keeps being rerouted by bad choices and worse timing.
The useful read here is simple. Sessa’s bakery years give Tony a real work history beneath the movie’s dramatization, while Bourdain’s own account supplies the moral bruise. The one open question is how much of Bourdain’s early life the film will compress or alter when Tony reaches audiences.
