A24 released the first official trailer for Tony, its biographical drama about the early life of Anthony Bourdain, on Tuesday May 5, 2026. The film opens in theaters in August.
Dominic Sessa, the breakout star of The Holdovers, plays a 19-year-old Bourdain during a summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts that changed everything. Antonio Banderas plays his mentor.
Emilia Jones plays the high school sweetheart who would become his first wife.
Eight years after Bourdain’s death, A24 is doing what only A24 would attempt with a subject this beloved and this complicated, making a biopic that deliberately refuses to show the famous part.
Tony is not about the man who wrote Kitchen Confidential. It is not about the host of Parts Unknown. It is not about the chef who became the world’s most well-traveled storyteller.
It is about the summer of 1975, when Anthony Bourdain was 19 years old, trying to become a writer, and ended up in a restaurant kitchen in Provincetown instead.
The years before anyone knew his name. The summer that made him.
What The Trailer Shows
The trailer opens with Sessa’s Bourdain in college mode, pitching himself as a writer, explaining his vision, performing the confidence of someone who has not yet been tested. “Okay, so I’m just going to walk you through the basic vision,” he says. “It’s a coming-of-age story.”
He loses a writing fellowship. He ends up in Provincetown. At a bar, he runs into a girl he knew from high school, played by Emilia Jones, fresh off her acclaimed performance in CODA, and she immediately asks him about a moment from his past.
“Didn’t you punch a hole in the principal’s door?” He assures her that things are different now. “A lot’s changed since high school.”
What has changed is that he is now about to walk into a restaurant kitchen that will alter the entire direction of his life.
The kitchen belongs to Ciro, played by Antonio Banderas, a seafood restaurant owner who becomes Tony’s first real mentor in the world of professional cooking.
Banderas’s Ciro is not gentle about his expectations. “We open Wednesday to Sunday. Start 11:00 AM. That means you are here at 10:45. 11:00 is late. Anyone late is fired.”
The restaurant is chaotic, the work is hard, and Bourdain, who came to Provincetown thinking of himself as a future writer, finds something in the kitchen he was not expecting to find.
The trailer’s most quietly significant moment involves an oyster. Ciro teaches Tony how to open one. Tony holds it in his hands and says, “I ate these in France when I was a kid. I said they taste like the future.”
The line is specific and not accidental, it is almost certainly drawn from Kitchen Confidential, where Bourdain wrote one of his most famous passages about the first oyster he ever ate on a boat off the French coast, describing it as “the proudest moment of my young life” and blaming it, in the nicest possible way, for everything that came after.
“If anybody asks,” Tony says near the end of the trailer, accepting the identity that has been building across the entire film, “I’m not a writer. I work in a kitchen.”
The Director And Why He Was The Right Call
Matt Johnson has been one of the more interesting voices in commercial filmmaking since his 2023 film BlackBerry, a biographical drama about the rise and fall of the Research in Motion smartphone that was praised for its ability to make corporate history feel like urgent, funny, human storytelling.
What BlackBerry demonstrated was that Johnson could take material that might sound dry and turn it into something genuinely alive, that he understood how to find the specific texture of a moment in time and put it on screen without it feeling like a history lesson.
That instinct is precisely what a Bourdain biopic requires. The instinct to not explain everything.
The instinct to trust the audience to understand why a summer in a Provincetown kitchen matters without spelling out the lifetime of consequences it produces.
The instinct to make the film feel like it is happening rather than like it is being narrated.
Johnson told Entertainment Weekly that he was only interested in making this project because it “covered a period of his life that remained mysterious and shrouded in self-report.”
That framing, a period that even Bourdain himself described selectively, in fragments, across multiple books and interviews, gives Johnson genuine creative territory to work in.
He is not adapting a well-documented public record. He is reconstructing a formative summer from incomplete testimony and filling in what Tony Bourdain might have actually felt during the months that made him who he became.
The Cast Around The Star
Dominic Sessa has the most important role of his young career here. His performance in The Holdovers introduced him as someone with the specific quality that great character actors have, the ability to make a person feel fully real without calling attention to the performance itself.
The Holdovers earned him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Breakthrough Performance.
Tony is his first genuine leading role in a theatrical feature, and A24, a studio that has demonstrated a remarkable ability to identify which actors are ready for the next level before anyone else has figured it out — is betting he is ready.
Antonio Banderas brings the kind of presence that a mentor character needs. Ciro is not a gentle teacher.
He is demanding in the way that anyone who has spent decades in professional kitchens becomes demanding, specific, uncompromising and certain that anything less than total commitment produces bad food.
The sequence where Banderas teaches Sessa’s Bourdain to open an oyster is, from the trailer, one of the more charged scenes in the film, two people at the exact moment when one recognizes something in the other worth cultivating.
Emilia Jones brings proven dramatic range to the role of Bourdain’s first love.
Rich Sommer, best known for his role as Harry Crane in Mad Men, appears in a supporting capacity.
Dagmara Domińczyk, whose work in Succession was one of the most praised supporting performances in that series’ run, rounds out a cast that is considerably stronger than most biopics assemble for equivalent roles.
Who Was Anthony Bourdain?
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born on June 25, 1956, in New York City. He grew up in Leonia, New Jersey, attended Vassar College, where he spent the kind of directionless early adulthood that the film is exploring, and then transferred his energy to cooking after the Provincetown summer changed what he thought he was going to do with his life.
He enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America and worked his way through the professional kitchen hierarchy for the next two decades before writing Kitchen Confidential in 2000, the memoir that introduced him to the world as something more than a talented chef.
Kitchen Confidential is the book that cracked open the closed world of professional restaurant kitchens for a general audience, describing the chaos, the addiction, the physical demand and the specific joy of feeding people at a high level with a candor that the food industry had not produced before.
The book launched him into television. A Cook’s Tour on Food Network, No Reservations on Travel Channel, and ultimately Parts Unknown on CNN, 12 seasons of international travel in which Bourdain used food as a window into cultures, politics, grief and connection across every geography he could reach.
He died on June 8, 2018, at age 61, in Strasbourg, France, while filming an episode of Parts Unknown. He is survived by his daughter Ariane Bourdain.
The period Tony covers, a summer in Provincetown in the mid-1970s, is one Bourdain described in fragments across his writing without ever fully reconstructing.
It is the origin point of everything. The summer he figured out, through the specific language of a restaurant kitchen, what he was actually good at and what he actually wanted. A24 and Matt Johnson are going back to find it.
What Comes Next?
Tony does not have a specific August release date beyond the month itself, A24 has set August 2026 but has not announced the precise date.
The late-summer release window puts it in position to enter the fall film festival circuit and potentially the awards conversation if the early response is strong.
A24’s track record of taking films from summer releases into major awards contention, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hereditary, Midsommar, and their extended catalog of prestige features, means that August is not a throwaway slot for this studio. It is a calculated position.
The trailer is doing what a good trailer should do. It makes you want to spend two hours with these people in this kitchen in this summer.
It does not explain why Bourdain mattered. It shows the summer he figured out that he did.
Tony opens in theaters in August 2026.
