High School to Hollywood: Dominic Sessa to Star in Anthony Bourdain Biopic

The prince of prep school is about to become Manhattan’s grittiest chef. In a Monday morning report, Deadline announced that The Holdovers star Dominic Sessa would depict Anthony Bourdain in an upcoming biopic. The role would mark the latest notch in Sessa’s meteoric rise to fame since he was plucked from his high school drama department in 2022.

“When you’re shooting in a school, it’s good to include students there,” The Holdovers director Alexander Payne told Town & Country. “It was nearing the end of the process, and we decided to activate that plan and call up the schools.” From there, Deerfield Academy returned and said, “We think we have someone very interesting.”

Since then, Sessa has gained renown as an incredible “natural talent.” He’s poised to appear in Now You See Me 3 (2025) and recently wrapped filming on Oh. What. Fun. and Tow. “It was interesting to see somebody just born to be a film actor,” said Payne.

The Bourdain film, tentatively titled Tony, is owned by Star Thrower Entertainment (STE), the production company behind Welcome Home and The Post. STE’s first biopic, King Richard, featured Will Smith as Richard Williams, the tennis coach (and father) behind Serena and Venus. Despite lukewarm box office sales, the film was a critical triumph, scoring a Best Picture nomination and a Smith victory for Best Lead Actor. The American Film Institute called it one of the 10 “outstanding films” of 2021.

Per Deadline’s report, A24 is circling Tony and has entered negotiations to collaborate with STE for the second time this year. Between Moonlight, Uncut Gems and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the studio has become renowned for its raw style and devotion to character personalism. “They just have a really incredible ability to identify the zeitgeist before everybody else has,” The Farewell director, Lulu Wang told The Guardian last year. “They set the trend.”

Though A24 has yet to acquire the Bourdain package, the company’s joint work on Star Entertainment’s Eternity is promising. More promising still is that they’ve already begun assembling a film crew. A24 has reportedly approached Matthew Miller, the creative force behind BlackBerry to direct the picture. He’d be joined by his co-writer, Matthew Johnson, who would work alongside STE’s White brothers in producing the film. BlackBerry, a fictionalized dark comedy on the creation of the first mobile phone, was the most nominated film in the history of the Canadian Screen Awards. A24’s interest in both Johnson and Miller could suggest a similarly laugh-you-to-death pneuma for Tony.

Lou Howe and Todd Bartels, a pair of Harvard grads with a handful of movie credits, co-wrote the film’s script.

For those unfamiliar, Bourdain was a New York chef who rose to prominence after his gritty, tell-all essays about the restaurant industry were published in The New Yorker. A year after his first piece was printed, he wrote the now-iconic Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. The result was two decades of fame, as his ornate confessions, culinary talent and uncompromising anti-establishmentism made him an American icon. He committed suicide in 2018. At present, it is unclear what part of Bourdain’s life the new film will cover.

Neither A24 nor Star Entertainment was available for comment.