[This story contains minor spoilers for A24 movie Tony.]
Matt Johnson, the director behind A24’s Anthony Bourdain movie, Tony, didn’t know all that much about Anthony Bourdain. “I viewed him as just a kind of Gen X host who I had zero connection with,” says the filmmaker.
For the uninitiated, Bourdain is the chef-turned-writer-turned-media personality behind Parts Unknown and No Reservations, known for traveling, eating and poetically opining on far-flung cuisines and cultures, and introducing audiences to remote corners of the world from behind a pair of Persols. Since his death by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61, he has become a near saint-like figure for the online masses wanting to suck the marrow out of life or, at least, out of a medium-rare ribeye.
But, heading into production on Tony, Johnson didn’t care much about any of that.
Far from a cradle-to-grave retelling, Tony instead focuses on the least documented blip in an incredibly well-chronicled and perpetually dissected life. Johnson wasn’t even that interested in the man behind the myth; he wanted to show the boy before the man.
