In the summer of 2018, the world lost Anthony Bourdain, a man who showed like no other that food connects – and is political. Seven years later, fans are still typing broken hearts under Instagram photos of the celebrity chef. Now the indie film studio A24 is daring to make a biopic: “Tony”, expected to be released in 2026, tells the story of Bourdain’s life before fame.
The film studio A24, known for works such as “Moonlight”, “Midsommar”, “The Lobster” and “Sorry, Baby”, continues to focus on bold character studies. In the pipeline are “The Smashing Machine” about MMA fighter Mark Kerr (with Dwayne Johnson) and “Marty Supreme” about table tennis icon Marty Reisman (with Timothée Chalamet and Tyler, The Creator). This will be followed in 2026 by “Tony” – the first feature film about chef, author and TV legend Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain’s death shocked the world in 2018, but the “Elvis of bad boy chefs” remains unforgotten. His legend lives on on social media – and how. Between viral tweets such as “girls don’t miss their ex, they miss Anthony Bourdain”, video tributes that accompany clips of the 1.93 m tall charmer with Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari” or Ethel Cain’s “Crush” and constantly new “We miss you” comments under his posts, it is clear that Bourdain was more than just a celebrity chef. He was a rebel, storyteller, political commentator, thoughtful observer – and for many, the first to respectfully portray the cultures of Myanmar, the Congo or the West Bank. Thanks to “Tony”, this world is now also accessible to new fans.
What we know about the biopic
Newcomer Dominic Sessa (“The Holdovers”) plays Bourdain. Alongside the 22-year-old is Oscar-nominated actor Antonio Banderas in an as yet unknown role.
A24 is producing the film, which was directed by Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry”). Filming, which also involved professional chefs on set, took place from May to July 2025.
This is not Bourdain’s first time on the big screen. A film was already dedicated to the “punk rocker among gourmets” in 2021: director Morgan Neville rummaged through archive material for the documentary “Roadrunner” (named after the song by the Modern Lovers, one of Bourdain’s favorite bands) and interviewed Tony’s closest circle to make the man with the leather jacket and the deeply sad eyes more tangible.
Commenting on Bourdain’s legacy, Neville said at the time: “Anthony probably did more to make us understand each other than anyone else in the history of television. He touched people not in spite of his weaknesses, but because of them.
The project received a lot of praise, but was also criticized because Neville did not shy away from using AI to reproduce the voice of the deceased.
The man of the 21st century
The new feature film shows a young, still unknown Anthony in the summer of 1976. Two years before starting his training at the Culinary Institute of America, the son of Jewish-Catholic parents was working in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there that Bourdain experienced a key moment: at a wedding, he saw the bride secretly disappear with the chef – and knew: “I want to be a chef.”
From then on, Tony battled his way through the city’s kitchens until he wrote “Kitchen Confidential” (inspired by George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London”), a gastronomic bestseller that turned the industry on its head. In it, the man who would later slurp noodle soup with Barack Obama in Vietnam gives insights behind the scenes of American kitchens. A mixture of anecdotes, criticism of the industry and a declaration of love. TV hits such as “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown” soon followed, giving a voice to chefs from Central Market in Phnom Penh to Michelin-starred kitchens in Tokyo. Bourdain’s credo: “Above all, don’t be a snob.”
In total, the American traveled to almost 100 countries and filmed 248 episodes. His original pitch for the first series was simple: “I travel the world, eat a lot of stuff and basically do whatever the hell I want”. He lovingly incorporated the love of culture that had been instilled in him since childhood – his father was a music manager, his mother a New York Times journalist. The Buenos Aires episode was an allusion to “Happy Together”, a film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, while the black-and-white sequences in the Rome episode repeatedly recall the style of Italian auteur Federico Fellini.
Bourdain wore a lapel microphone during filming, which recorded all everyday sounds (“We want you to know what a place sounds like – not just what it looks like”). At the same time, Tony was aware of the paradox of his mission: the New Yorker came across the greatest places – but found that he was ruining them by turning them into tourist hotspots.
Restaurant critic Alan Richman said of Bourdain: “I don’t know anyone who is more of a 21st century man than him – the way he acts, the way he speaks, his craziness, his vulgarity.”
A aesthete with anger in his belly
Anthony did not shy away from political statements. His reckoning with Henry Kissinger in his memoir “A Cook’s Tour” (2001) is infamous: “Anyone who has been to Cambodia wants to beat Kissinger to death with their bare hands.” In 2018, he retweeted the quote and added: “I regret many things I once said. Not this.” The occasion was the former US Secretary of State’s role in the secret carpet bombing of the neutral country during the Vietnam War, in which, according to historian Ben Kiernan, founding director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 civilians died – others estimate over 500,000 victims.
In an interview for an award-winning portrait, journalist and author Patrick Radden Keefe (“Empire of Pain”, “Say Nothing”) reminded Bourdain that he often categorically condemned people, but later had dinner with them – like with celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse. Bourdain’s dry reply: “Emeril didn’t bomb Cambodia.”
In the same article, Keefe describes the classically trained chef as “Apollo in drag as Dionysus” – an aesthete in the guise of a hedonist. Bourdain was vulnerable and uncompromising at the same time, someone who really got involved in every encounter and remained unforgettable for this very reason.
Addictions and demons
Behind the charm lay a troubled soul. Bourdain spoke openly about his depression, bipolar episodes, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug addiction: Heroin, crack, cocaine. In the obituary written by Keefe, the journalist recalls how Bourdain told him that he had deliberately thrown himself into addiction as a young man. The reason for his withdrawal: Tony hated being dependent on the mercy of others. He was also a vain person and “could no longer stand what he saw in the mirror”. Bourdain managed to quit without rehab and then worked manically. And kept drinking.
Tony’s friends described him as driven, always searching for something that could not be held on to. Keefe suggested that this restlessness was perhaps less a thirst for adventure than an escape from inner demons. Any notion of writing a light-footed portrait of a man with a dream job was quickly eclipsed by the realization that Bourdain was never truly satisfied.
For the celebrated TV host, gastronomy was “the science of pain”, as he wrote in his New Yorker essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This”. Also in this text, which would later become “Kitchen Confidential”: a note on why you shouldn’t order fish on Mondays and a detailed vent about brunch.
Bizarre fears and big plans
In 2016, the former chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York revealed in an interview with talk show host Conan O’Brien that he has a “morbid fear of everything Swiss”. Alpine panoramas, cuckoo clocks, cheese with holes – but yodeling in particular makes his blood run cold: “You can feel it to the core.” On the list of his top 5 fears, the country was in third place – along with clowns (“Threatening figures with murderous tendencies”), mimes (“Like cats, they seek out those who are afraid of them”), karaoke (“I prefer to do embarrassing things in private”) and rats.
One of Tony’s most ambitious ideas was the Bourdain Market: a gigantic street food paradise à la the sci-fi film “Blade Runner” (“high-end gastronomy, staged as a rough, polyglot microcosm”). Visas were to enable the world’s best chefs to work in the 350-million-dollar market. The aim: a walk-in counterpart to the long-haul travels of the man known for his belief that basic cooking skills are a virtue. But the project, which was planned for 2019, remained unfinished. On 8. Anthony Bourdain was found dead by his friend and colleague Éric Ripert in a hotel in Kaysersberg-Vignoble, France, on June 1, 2018. He was 61 years old.
A complicated legacy
Patrick Radden Keefe described Bourdain as someone whose strengths and weaknesses were inextricably intertwined – constantly searching, constantly questioning, and always leaving things behind that he should not have left behind
Whether “Tony” can do justice to this multi-faceted man – the chef, the poet, the addict, the provocateur, the gonzo journalist – remains to be seen in 2026.
Fans are divided: some are happy about any opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of the icon. Others are certain: Bourdain would have hated a biopic about himself.
The culinary rock star left behind no easy legacy, but a deeply moving one – and the realization that travel, good food and honest conversation can change the world. He himself said: “Travel isn’t always pretty, it even breaks your heart. The journey changes you; it should change you. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
Want to know why you don’t want to order fish in a restaurant on Mondays? Read here the New Yorker essay that made Bourdain a literary star in no time at all.
Are you also a foodie, but unlike Bourdain, are you more animal-friendly? Here are the best vegan spots in Zurich.
Photos: Production Companies “Roadrunner”: CNN Films, HBO Max, Tremolo Productions, Zero Point Zero, Distributed by Focus Features.
