Antonio Banderas on playing 'very mysterious' maestro chef in Anthony Bourdain biopic
Antonio Banderas as Chef, Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain and Leo Woodall as Sal in Tony. Picture: A24
Anthony Bourdain will always be remembered as a cultural icon, a connoisseur of global cuisine and culture, and a chronicler of the human condition.
The New York chef who became a bestselling memoirist with in 2000, and later one of television’s most recognisable travel documentarians, was not always the distinguished figure the world came to know and love.
Before Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain, there was the summer of 1975.
In the picturesque beachside enclave of Provincetown, on Massachusetts’ idyllic Cape Cod, a lanky teenager from New Jersey began to discover the first traces of the man he would become.
a new biopic from Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, explores the origin story of the late culinary legend before he found his passion and purpose.
The film stars Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain, reckless, ambitious and overconfident and Antonio Banderas as the paternal seafood chef who takes him under his wing.
Leo Woodall plays Bourdain’s hedonistic, thrill-seeking co-worker, while Emilia Jones stars as his love interest, Nancy.
Rather than dwelling on Bourdain’s tragic death in 2018, when he was found dead in his hotel room in France at the age of 61, Tony turns its attention to his becoming: the formative experiences, relationships, and choices that shaped one of the most influential culinary voices of his generation.
“With I wanted to figure out how Bourdain became who he was, and the discovery of Provincetown was as much a surprise to me as it was to him,” says Johnson, 40.
“It’s a coming-of-age story about somebody we all think we know, but nobody knows from this specific period of his life.
“The concept for the film was taking a single formative summer from Anthony Bourdain’s youth and expanding on the mythology people know about him, much of which originated from this brief moment in time.”
Johnson, who also directed says that while the film is based on real events and rooted in Bourdain’s own recollections, it also imagines the private life behind the public persona.
“The only Anthony Bourdain we’ll ever know is the one he allowed us to know through what he wrote and what he created for television,” Johnson says. “This story is about the private side that led to that very public life.”
In the film, the biggest influence on Bourdain’s life is Chef, played by Banderas.
“The relationship between Tony and Chef is about the transfer from a permissive father to a father figure who makes demands of you,” Johnson explains. “Ultimately, Tony comes to really appreciate that.”
Banderas, 65, a frequent collaborator of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, says his character recognises that Bourdain is heading down a dangerous path.
“He’s a guy with a lot of dignity, who has the capacity to read this young kid in his tribulations and the problems he’s confronting at such an early age in his life,” says the Spanish actor.
“He notices that he’s going in the wrong direction, in terms of love, in terms of drugs. He’s entering a tunnel from which it’s very difficult to get out.”
With little known about the real-life chef who inspired the character, Banderas says the filmmakers had room to create someone more symbolic than strictly biographical.
“There is not so much information about him, which means we can create a character that is very mysterious. He almost became a metaphor for what Tony Bourdain needed at this particular time in his life.”
Banderas says he initially considered creating a backstory for his character, imagining that he had perhaps lost a son and was therefore compelled to take Bourdain under his wing. In the end, however, they decided to keep the character’s motivations deliberately ambiguous.
“Instead, we tried to erase all of that and keep it very simple: I’m an older guy, he’s a younger guy, and I can see the mistakes he’s making because I’ve been there before. I’m just trying to help,” he explains.
“We also wanted to return to the old traditions of the town where we were, the way things were done by the community, and the importance of that togetherness. In that sense, I found the film very revealing, very beautiful.
“We didn’t try to do extra work by giving him a second or third backstory. We stayed true to what the character needed to be.”
Banderas, who owns several restaurants in his home city of Malaga, says he relished immersing himself in the kitchen scenes.
“I’m not only a foodie, I’m a professional. I have seven restaurants,” he says with a smile.
“I went into the kitchen of one of them, the one that specialises in seafood, where a chef called Rocio taught me how to open oysters without killing myself, clean fish, and do all the different jobs that come with preparing seafood.
“It’s not as easy as it looks. You have to have good hands and experience. You need to handle the knives properly, and everything has to be in order.”
He adds: “Discipline is important in every walk of life, but especially in a kitchen. It’s not just about convincing people that what you’re creating tastes good. You also have to be clean. You have to think about hygiene and health all the time.
“At that time, though, these guys weren’t doing that at all. As you see in the film, they were drinking, taking drugs and vomiting. There were all sorts of things happening that today would get you sued.
“My character is trying to correct that behaviour. He goes a little further by trying to educate the people around him in the kitchen, but sometimes it’s almost impossible.”
Though Bourdain’s later life and his tragic death inevitably loom over his legacy, the filmmakers behind made a conscious decision not to let the film be defined by retrospective tragedy.
“We wanted to make a hopeful movie,” Johnson says.
- Tony is in Irish cinemas from Friday, August 14.
