Dominic Sessa, star of the upcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony, knows what you might be thinking about his new movie.

“If I saw the headline, ‘Anthony Bourdain biopic,’ without knowing anything else, I would cringe at that,” he says.

The genre, with its sanitized storylines and Oscar-baiting pretensions, seems fundamentally at odds with the iconoclastic chef and television personality. And signing on to play Bourdain means signing up for plenty of scrutiny.

“There are so many people who are massive fans of him, and they all have their own version of what he means to them,” Sessa says. “Trying to live up to that feels weird and daunting.”

But, potential cultural- commentary minefield aside, the role was everything Sessa had been looking for.

The 23-year-old has had an unusually swift rise. In 2022, he attended a casting call at his boarding school, Deerfield Academy, out of curiosity. Originally enrolled on a hockey scholarship, an injury had led him to drama classes, and he figured he might get lucky and land a background role. Instead, he was cast oppositePaul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, earning a Critics Choice Award and BAFTA and Spirit Award nominations. The success gave Sessa the luxury of choosing his next moves.

“I learned so much from working with Paul Giamatti that I knew I wanted to surround myself with the best actors I possibly could,” he says. He followedThe Holdovers with the indie Tow, starring Rose Byrne; the Prime Video holiday comedy Oh. What. Fun., with Michelle Pfeiffer; and the upcoming Now You See Me sequel alongside Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson. Along the way, he also paid close attention to how his veteran co-stars carried themselves. “I learned that people need to like being around you,” he says.

Shortly before flying to Budapest to shoot Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, Sessa took a general meeting with Canadian director Matt Johnson. Both had read — and initially passed on — the script for Tony, but during the conversation, they realized they were drawn to the period of Bourdain’s life depicted in the film, which condenses four years into one formative summer working as a dishwasher in a Provincetown, Massachusetts, restaurant.

“We couldn’t relate to the guy we knew, a guy who travels the world and eats food and writes about it,” Sessa says. “But in the context of this film, he’s a young man who is basically trying to deceive the world into treating him like an adult and then learning the hard way how to operate with integrity.”

Johnson and Sessa decided to package the project and pitch it to producers. Then, halfway through shooting Now You See Me, Sessa came across a Deadline story announcing that he would play Bourdain.

“I called Matt and was like, ‘I guess we’re making this movie?’ ” he says with a laugh.

Even though Tony depicts Bourdain before he became a celebrated chef, Sessa’s first stop in preparing for the role was the kitchen at Brooklyn restaurant Gertrude’s, where head chef Eli Sussman taught him to shuck oysters. Combined with five childhood summers making doughnuts and washing dishes at a bakery in his New Jersey hometown, it gave him enough confidence for the film’s kitchen scenes.

The whirlwind, 26-day shoot tested him in other ways. “On the first day, I had this monologue to a group of Tony’s professors, and it was the most lines I’ve ever had,” he says. “It was my first time being number one on the call sheet, and I really put a lot of pressure on myself.”

Just as important, Sessa wanted the film to avoid the self-conscious flourishes that often plague biopics.

“We never wanted to have some bait-y scene where it felt like, ‘Oh, this is the award-winning scene of the movie,’ ” Sessa explains. “Especially in a movie about Bourdain — that’s just disingenuous and gross.”

Barely three years after The Holdovers, the actor is already looking for another change of pace. He recently wrapped a still-secret European crime drama.

“I’m basically playing a psycho, and for the first time in my life, I got to play someone who isn’t a depressed teenager,” he says with a laugh. “I got to raise my voice, and scream, and do stunts and drive a fast car. Ironically, it’s the exact kind of thing that Bourdain himself would watch — and love.”

This story appeared in the Aug. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.