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Dominic Sessa portrays a young Anthony Bourdain working in a restaurant for the first time in ‘Tony,’ in limited theaters Aug. 7 and everywhere Aug. 21
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Chef Eric Ripert compares how Anthony Bourdain is portrayed as a 19-year-old in the new movie Tony to the man he befriended in the 2000s after Kitchen Confidential‘s publication
Dominic Sessa portrays a young Bourdain in Tony, which covers the famed chef and author’s earliest experiences working in a restaurant
Tony is in limited theaters Aug. 7; it expands everywhere Aug. 21
Eric Ripert is sharing the differences between Dominic Sessa‘s performance as a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain in the new biopic Tony and the real-life man he became friends with decades later.
Ripert, the celebrated French chef and longtime friend of Bourdain’s, recently sat down with PEOPLE to discuss Tony, a movie that adapts the first few chapters of Bourdain’s breakthrough 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential and dramatizes a summer he spent working at a restaurant in Provincetown, Mass. that set him on a path toward life as a chef. Ripert is the chef behind the famed New York City-based restaurant Le Bernardin; he remembers that he first met Bourdain, who died at 61 in 2018, some time after Kitchen Confidential was first published.
“He had [given] compliments [to my work in the book] and then I met Tony and the Tony that I met at the time was obviously very different than the Tony that is in the movie,” Ripert says. “The Eric Ripert that speaks to you today is very different than the 19-years-old Eric Ripert when I started in the industry. So you cannot compare the Tony Bourdain that I met with the Tony Bourdain from the movie. However, I appreciated the fact that they portrayed Anthony being a young man searching to find himself and ending up in a kitchen.”
“He decides to be serious after having, summer of drugs, rock and roll and, and everything — sex, I guess,” he adds. “So I enjoyed seeing the movie, even if it doesn’t represent the Tony that I knew.”
In Tony, a young Bourdain (Sessa, 23) travels to Provincetown in between college semesters in hopes of wooing a girl (Emilia Jones) and ultimately finds himself on a new career path after a series of drunken mishaps force him to work at a local seafood restaurant known as the Dreadnaught. After a rude awakening and introduction to the restaurant industry, Bourdain finds himself enjoying the work and learning the ins and outs of a kitchen from a chef portrayed by Antonio Banderas, as well as the hard-partying lifestyle the hard-partying lifestyle that a cook in the kitchen (Leo Woodall) exposes him to.
Many details from the movie are pulled directly from Kitchen Confidential‘s opening moments. Though Ripert and Bourdain were friends for well over a decade, the chef says that he never visited Provincetown with Bourdain, nor does he recall the popular television host speaking to his experience working in restaurants there beyond what he wrote in Kitchen Confidential. “Tony was a great storyteller, and he never really liked to speak too much about himself,” he adds. “We never really spoke too much about those years other than what has been published by him.”
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Though Ripert says Bourdain was not fond of talking about himself, he remembers his friend as “always very gracious and never complained about” his own celebrity status after he found fame in the early 2000s. “He was very generous and grateful to be where he was. He said it many times, ‘I could still be in a kitchen at my age, which would be really bad news, because I’m too old to be in a kitchen.’ When he was doing book tours or when he was traveling or even on his day off in New York, he was always very kind and nice to his fans.”
Anthony Bourdain died on June 8, 2018. He was 61.
Tony is in limited theaters Aug. 7 and expands everywhere Aug. 21.
Read the original article on People
