How a Bourdain Biopic Was Born in the Dive Bar He Loved Most
A new A24 biopic about Anthony Bourdain, titled Tony, traces its origin to the very dive bar where the late chef and television host once drank — the Old Colony Tap in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, friends since boarding school and later Harvard classmates, spent hours at the bar and other Provincetown haunts, and the idea for the film came together there, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film stars Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain arriving in Provincetown and plunging into the chaotic world of a restaurant kitchen. Matt Johnson directs. A24 is behind the project. The screenplay draws on chapters from Bourdain's bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential that recount his Provincetown summers — four of them, starting in the 1970s, where he worked his way up from dishwasher to line cook, as The Hollywood Reporter details.
Bartels and Howe wrote the script as a spec — an original screenplay written without a commission or guarantee of sale — during the 2023 WGA strike, when guild members were barred from working on most studio projects. Their manager at Mosaic, Emily Rose, encouraged them to pursue the Bourdain idea. The writers had already earned industry notice: their Dolly Parton script Dumb Blonde landed on the Black List, an annual survey of admired unproduced screenplays, in 2022. The keepers of Bourdain's estate, his longtime literary agent Kimberly Witherspoon and his widow Ottavia Busia, control access to the late host's life rights and materials.
A draft of the screenplay opens with Bourdain breathing in the Provincetown sea air, passing dive bars, clam shacks, penny candy stores, and a sex toy shop, according to a draft published on Scribd. The texture is immediate, the setting specific.
The cast prepared by working in real restaurant kitchens to learn the rhythms and pressures of line cooking, as Food & Wine reported. Sessa, for his part, drew parallels between his own experiences and Bourdain's while developing the role with the screenwriters, according to Bon Appétit.
Tony screened with a preview and Q&A at the Provincetown International Film Festival in May 2026, bringing the story back to the town where it begins and where it was conceived, as Boston Magazine reported. The film is slated as a 2026 release.
Bourdain died in 2018. He was 61. His influence on food television and travel writing — and on the idea that a cook's life was worth listening to — remains the cultural bedrock beneath any film that takes him as its subject.
What gives Tony its unusual shape is the decision to focus on the young Bourdain, before the television cameras and the global fame. The story begins with a teenager walking into a kitchen, not a celebrity walking onto a set. Bartels and Howe found that story in the place Bourdain kept returning to, and they wrote it in the place he loved.
