Dominic Sessa on Playing a Anthony Bourdain Before He Became Bourdain

The Parting Shot with H. Alan Scott · Aug 19, 2026 · 23m

Anthony Bourdain was never just a chef. Dominic Sessa joins Newsweek's H. Alan Scott to talk about ‘Tony,’ the new film that follows a 19-year-old Bourdain through a summer in Provincetown after a rejection from Vassar, drawn from his 2000 memoir ‘Kitchen Confidential.’ Sessa came to the role with almost no relationship to the man: "I wasn't working from a place of trying to meet this standard of who he was in my mind." What he played instead was a kid absorbing everything around him. "I'm a 19-year-old young guy who doesn't really know anything about the world but pretends they do."…