Dominic Sessa, the Bafta-nominated star of The Holdovers, has been cast to play the late celebrity chef and travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain in a new biopic.
The A24 film, from Blackberry director Matt Johnson, will also star Antonio Banderas in an as-yet-unannounced role.
Titled Tony, the film is set in 1976 when Bourdain was 20 years old and takes place in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he started his career as a dishwasher. Production is set to begin next month.
The project was developed by Star Thrower Entertainment, who were Oscar-nominated in 2022 for their Richard Williams biopic King Richard.
Sessa made his film debut in Alexander Payne’s 2023 coming-of-age drama The Holdovers, and will next be seen in the conjuring heist sequel Now You See Me 3 and Michael Showalter’s Christmas comedy Oh. What. Fun.
Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America as a 22-year-old in 1978. He spent several years working at restaurants in New York City, including a spell as an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan.
In 1999, The New Yorker published his tell-all article about life in the kitchen, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” The success of the piece led to the publication of his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential the following year.
Bourdain went on to host a series of food and travel shows on television, starting with A Cook’s Tour in 2002 and followed by No Reservations and Parts Unknown.
After his death, Bourdain was the subject of Morgan Neville’s documentary Roadrunner.
The film provoked controversy with its use of a deepfake voiceover, as it included three instances in which computer technology was used to mimic the voice of the late host.
Neville told The New Yorker that AI was used to make it sound like Bourdain was reading aloud an email he sent to the artist David Choe.
“There were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of,” Neville said.
After providing a software company with “about a dozen” hours of recordings of Bourdain speaking, Neville was able to access an “AI model of his voice.”
“If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI, and you’re not going to know,” Neville said.
He added: “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
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