Dominic Sessa From the Holdover is Reportedly in Discussions to Take a Leading Role in a Biopic of Anthony Bourdain

A biopic of Anthony Bourdain is now in development, with Dominic Sessa being considered to play the late celebrity chef.

On Monday, August 12, Deadline revealed that Sessa, 21, would be playing Bourdain in the Tony project. The film will be directed by Matt Johnson (Blackberry), with Todd Bartels and Lou Howe penning the script.

Johnson, Matthew Miller, Trevor White, and Tim White are in talks with A24 to produce under their Star Thrower Entertainment banner. Executive Producer Emily Rose.

An A24 representative remained silent.

Sessa won praise for his breakthrough performance in the 2023 film The Holdovers as a disturbed teenager. The dramatization brought in an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and a Best Supporting Actress win for Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who played the role of the bereaved mother Mary Lamb, who starred alongside Sessa.

In June 2018, while in Strasbourg, France, for the filming of his CNN documentary series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Bourdain, at sixty-one, took his own life. In his hotel room, his friend Eric Ripert discovered him unconscious.

A few days later, Gladys Bourdain, Anthony’s mother, honored her “feisty and very talented” son in an emotional appearance with the Today show on June 11.

She claimed that he didn’t adopt any personas or disguises. “Everyone could see who he was and what he was about.”

The New York Times’s Gladys, a former editor, admitted to the publication that Anthony “had been in a dark mood” in the days leading up to his death, but she never “dreamed” he “would do something like this.”

A number of well-known friends paid homage to Bourdain in the book Anthony Bourdain Remembered, which was published months after his passing. These friends included former president Barack Obama and director Ken Burns.

Obama, sixty-three, and Bourdain made a memorable appearance together on a 2016 Parts Unknown episode that was recorded in Hanoi, Vietnam. Obama wrote, “Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer,” in reference to that encounter in his memorial. I will always remember Tony this way. He imparted knowledge on food, but more significantly, he showed us how it can unite us. to slightly allay our fear of the unknown. He will be missed.

The renowned chef is survived by his 17-year-old daughter Ariane and his divorced wife Ottavia Butta.