He’s got no reservations.
Dominic Sessa, the breakout star of the Oscar-winning movie “The Holdovers,” is in talks to play legendary chef and travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain in a biopic that will be called “Tony,” according to Deadline.
A24 is reportedly in talks to produce the project.
Sessa, 21, rose to fame in “The Holdovers” playing Angus Tully, a boarding school student left at his school over Christmas break while classics teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) was forced to chaperone. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who co-starred as cafeteria manager and grieving mother Mary Lamb, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the film.
At present, it hasn’t been announced what era of Bourdain’s life “Tony” will cover or how many years it will span.
There’s a lot of ground to cover, even if it’s focusing on his younger years.
Bourdain grew up in Manhattan and New Jersey, with a record exec father and a New York Times editor mother, and worked at various seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before attending the prestigious Culinary Institute of America and running various restaurants in New York City.
Sessa could play that era of Bourdain’s life.
His best-selling book “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” was published in 2000.
In 2005, Bourdain divorced his first wife, high school sweetheart Nancy Putkoski. He met restaurant manager Ottavia Busia not long after, and the two tied the knot and welcomed a daughter, Ariane, in 2007 before separating in 2016.
“Tony got really famous,” celeb restaurateur David Chang said in the 2021 documentary “Roadrunner,” which shows Chang and Bourdain commiserating about feeling isolated and distant from old friends.
“It was just an incessant, nonstop barrage.”
Other friends and colleagues in that film recall Bourdain saying he was becoming agoraphobic and his life was getting “smaller and smaller” because he couldn’t be out in public.
Bourdain, best known for hosting “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” died by suicide in 2018 at age 61.
There have been other film projects based on Bourdain since his passing, such as “Roadrunner.”
But that documentary faced backlash when it came to light that filmmaker Morgan Neville used artificial intelligence to re-create Bourdain’s voice after his death.
“There were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of,” Neville said, according to a 2021 interview with the New Yorker.
“I created an A.I. model of his voice.”
Sessa is a rising star who will also appear in “Now You See Me 3” and the TV show “Tow” starring Rose Byrne.
“Tony” does not yet have an announced premiere date.
