Dominic Sessa Has No Reservations About His Rise to Fame

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Dominic Sessa poses for an exclusive Collider portrait in New York City on Aug. 18, 2026. (Photo by Lenne Chai)

Sessa opens up about stepping into Anthony Bourdain’s shoes, learning from his co-stars, and finding his way after ‘The Holdovers.’

Published Aug 24, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Gabrielle Moss has been writing about pop culture for over a decade, for publications including The New Yorker, GQ.com, Slate, Bustle, New York Magazine, and many more. Her book,
"Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction," was released in 2018, and she was featured in the 2023 documentary "Judy Blume Forever."

There’s no getting around it: Dominic Sessa looks like Anthony Bourdain. Even over Zoom, a year after wrapping the filming of Tony, his new dramedy about Bourdain’s much-mythologized youth, Sessa’s loose brown curls fall around a long face with a strong chin in a way that can’t help but evoke photos of the young chef back in the ‘70s (don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about — you had them saved to your Pinterest board in 2016, just like everyone else).

But while Sessa is as close to a young Bourdain doppelganger as you’re liable to find in modern Hollywood (he might also be the first male film star allowed to rock a headful of bouncy dark brown ringlets since…Elliott Gould?), that physical likeness is the end of Tony’s resemblance to a traditional celebrity biopic. Yes, Tony is a movie about Anthony Bourdain, but it's also a movie about Dominic Sessa.

Like Bourdain, unexpected circumstances pushed Sessa towards the career path that would come to define his life. Also like Bourdain, once he was on that path, he sought the mentorship of wise, experienced elders who knew what the hell they were doing when he didn’t, who could help him figure out what the rest of his life might look like. The film intertwines both their experiences into a moving portrait of what it means to be young, confused, and in search of the person you’ll eventually become — and leaves the viewer reconsidering the true value of an origin story.

Playing Anthony Bourdain Taught Dominic Sessa About Himself

I’m not being cute and editorializing here; Sessa is saying just as much himself from a hotel room in Los Angeles, where the New Jersey native is currently on the promotion circuit for Tony. “Every single movie I've done, my biggest concern was making sure I surrounded myself with just incredible actors,” he says. “It's the best school you can have.”

While, in the past, that schooling had only extended as far as co-stars like Jesse Eisenberg giving him advice, with Tony, Sessa’s education takes place on the big screen. It’s clear that the film isn’t just a story about young Bourdain blooming under the mentorship of a motley crew of Provincetown, Massachusetts chefs that includes Antonio Banderas, Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias; it’s also aboutSessa himself blooming under the mentorship of the same group of people.

“As much as they are influencing Tony in the film,” Sessa says, “that's how I looked at these people in real life. When Leo came to set, I was like, ‘Holy shit! This guy is a real deal actor.’ I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of him. I wanted to make sure that I was earning his trust and he was okay with what I was doing, and I feel like that reads when we’re on camera. Same thing with Antonio: I didn't want to piss him off; I didn't want him to be angry at me. That's just how I viewed these people genuinely, and it's a testament to Matt putting the cast together in that way, and also their being willing to do that, to be in this movie with me.”

As much as they are influencing Tony in the film, that's how I looked at these people in real life.

On a set with many mentors, director Matt Johnson (Blackberry) might have been Sessa's greatest teacher. Johnson, who got his start as the co-creator of the absurdist TV show Nirvana the Band the Show and is best known for his work in comedy, was "still insane every day," Sessa jokes. But he was also able to guide the actor to the places he needed to go to make the sad, angry, vulnerable Bourdain come alive as someone you could care about. "[Matt's] a very heartfelt, deep person. He's able to bring a lot of emotion out of me, and in the way he talks and the way he speaks to me specifically," Sessa adds. "I feel like we've lived a very similar life in a lot of ways, and he knows how to make me feel good or explain to me how to look at things in a way that I can confront them and actually perform it. It's one thing to really just think about something; it's another thing to show it to people. And he's a master at working with actors in that way."

Johnson's loose, emotionally focused directing style gave Sessa's off-screen experiences lots of opportunities to surface on screen, through scenes that show Sessa learning in real time as his version of Bourdain does. “A lot of my direction,” Sessa recalls, “was like, ‘All right, Leo's gonna teach you how to smoke a cigarette.’ ‘Leo's going to teach you how to do cocaine,’ and then ‘Antonio's going to teach you how to cook a lobster and make ketchup.’ I really got to have this romantic experimental experience, with these very unique specific human beings who also brought so much of their own life into their characters and what they were doing.”

That freedom wasn’t exactly a 100% idyllic experience for Sessa. “I felt a lot of pressure to be good,” he laughs. “It was a really small movie, in a way. We didn't have a lot of time, and everybody was just doing it because they believed in the story, and they believed in Matt. I felt a lot of pressure in that I wanted them to come to set and feel like they made a good choice in being part of this, and that it was working, and that we weren't embarrassing ourselves in front of these professionals.”

Sessa Wasn't an Anthony Bourdain Fan — and That's Why He Was So Good at Playing Him

While biopics are often a fan’s medium — think Jamie Foxx bringing a lifetime of love to Ray, or Taylor Swift’s attempts to get a Joni Mitchell film off the ground — Sessa didn’t actually know much about Bourdain at all before landing the role of the chef as a young, impudent jerk.

“I knew who he was,” Sessa says, “but this was the first time that I really started engaging with his work and his TV shows, and getting to know anything about him.” This ends up being one of the film’s greatest assets. Its loose relationship to Bourdain's mythos gives Tony the freedom to transform from one man’s life story into a more universally relatable coming-of-age tale about maturity, mentorship, and learning how not to act like an asshole.

The film, which follows Tony over the course of a life-changing summer working in a Provincetown restaurant as he is pulled between the twin forces of Woodall's bad-boy cook Sal and Banderas' exacting and mysterious Chef, includes some of the basics that will be familiar to any reader of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Bourdain's career-making 2000 memoir. Tony starts as a dishwasher, participates in a frenzied late-night fishing expedition, earns the disdain of his coworkers by asking for a Band-Aid after he burns himself on a hot pan, watches a coworker's illicit tryst with a new bride in the restaurant's alleyway, and eventually decides to apply to the Culinary Institute of America.

But even those moments are given their own meaning. In the book, Bourdain's decision to apply to culinary school is framed as "a way to get back at [his] tormentors” after a humiliating stint spent working with experienced chefs who viewed him as an annoying young punk; in Tony, it's a moment that signals not just a new chapter in Bourdain's life, but a respect for the men in Provincetown who changed his life.

The decision to use Bourdain's biography as a jumping-off point, rather than a bible, is what gives the film room to breathe. “What I've learned about fans of Anthony Bourdain, since working on this, is that people have very strong opinions about this person, and he means something very specific to each person out there,” Sessa recalls. Had he had a pre-existing relationship to Bourdain, “I — and [director] Matt [Johnson] as well — I think we both would have been constantly attempting to live up to this version, this ideal of this person we really looked up to in our minds. And it would have been difficult for us — it would have screwed us.”

Instead, being a Bourdain newbie gave Sessa relief from the pressure to do fan service or perform an imitation (“I still don't feel like I would want to do a biopic in the way where I'm really transforming into another person, and trying to mimic them.”). Instead, he had space to discover his Tony Bourdain and to treat the film as a narrative that grew over the course of production rather than a history lesson. “Coming at it from a place of, every day on set, as we were filming, still asking questions about this person and thinking and developing an opinion about him,” he adds, “was the best way, I think, of working on something like this.”

“People Who Knew Him at the Time Will Be Like, ‘That's Not How It Happened’”

Even if the production had wanted to hew closely to the facts, the truth is that there wasn’t that much to go on. Bourdain's time in Provincetown is only covered in two brief chapters in Kitchen Confidential — and, as Sessa found when he actually showed up in Provincetown, where most of the film was shot, even those stories were not quite carved in stone.

The Cape Cod hamlet has changed surprisingly little over the past 50 years — "it's got a lot fewer fishermen than there were back then, but it looks the same as the photos," Sessa says. It's so unchanged, in fact, that some of the people who had a supporting presence in Kitchen Confidential's Provincetown excerpts are still living there today.

“We got to meet a lot of the people that knew Bourdain when he was there in the 70s, and we got to eat at a lot of the restaurants that he worked at,” Sessa recalls. Many of those folks even disputed the way the late chef recalled certain events in Kitchen Confidential. “Everybody remembers everything differently, and even Bourdain's accounts of what happened in Provincetown and the few things he says about it in detail — people who knew him at the time will be like, ‘That's not how it happened, you know.’ He's even misremembering things.”

‘Tony’ Isn’t About Bourdain; It’s About the People Around Him

While the Tony Bourdain of the film bears minimal resemblance to the beloved cultural icon who once housed Vietnamese pork belly with Barack Obama and influenced an entire generation's travel and eating habits, for Sessa, that's the point. Tony is less concerned with hitting particular beats in Bourdain's biography than it is with telling the emotional story of how we are all transformed by the people in our lives who see something in us that we don't, and how we hold those people within us forever.

Sessa is in pretty much every scene of Tony, and carries the film on his lanky, leather-clad shoulders. But in preparation for his extremely vulnerable portrayal of Bourdain, Sessa dispensed with biopic traditions like obsessively studying the subject’s physical mannerisms or working with a dialect coach to perfectly ape their voice. Case in point: despite the fact that the majority of the film’s action takes place in front of the burners of The Flagship, the seafood restaurant overseen by Banderas’ tough-love-dispensing chef, Sessa did not transform into a kitchen whiz.

“I don't think I got any better at cooking from this movie,” he proclaims. “I can do the basic stuff,” he adds, like cook a steak or steam some vegetables, but he’d usually rather eat out at a restaurant near his apartment in New York City, which is home to “the best food in the world.” (He did, however, get trained in how to shuck an oyster, which is one of the film’s plot points — “not very fast, but I can do it cleanly.”)

The characters around me, those are the ones that really form the person that we know later.

Instead, Sessa focused on learning about the community that shaped Bourdain during this pivotal point in his life. “The biggest part [of preparing] was understanding the people around him, honestly, and the environment around him,” he explains. Bourdain’s writing about the chefs and line cooks he worked under early in his career, “how they made him feel, and the thoughts that were going through his mind when he was seeing these things for the first time — that's what was important to me.”

Focusing on the people around Bourdain doesn’t just give Tony a freshness and energy that a lot of recent biopics have lacked; it also gives insight into how the Bourdain persona was formed. "It feels like a lot of the characteristics of Bourdain, as we know him and how he's popular in the world — you know, in his 40s and 50s, he's tatted up, and we know he has this history with drug addiction and all of these things, but also we know he's an incredible writer and was able to successfully run a kitchen in New York, efficiently and professionally — all of those things are in this movie in the other characters," says Sessa. "That all lives in Antonio['s character]. That all lives in Leo's character and Stavros' character. And I'm kind of just this blank slate who's so unwilling to let go of his ego, and then finally these people force me to, and I open up. The characters around me, those are the ones that really form the person that we know later."

Sessa’s Career Breakthrough Wasn’t an Accident

I lied before, when I said hair and a passion for mentors were the only things Sessa and Bourdain had in common. They’re also both originally from New Jersey; Bourdain hailed from the New York City suburb of Leonia, while Sessa grew up in the Jersey Shore town of Ocean City — though Sessa didn’t feel too much of a connection on that front. “I think if he was from Kentucky, it wouldn't have changed much for me,” he says, though Johnson liked the parallel. “Matt would just always be like, ‘Yeah, like Anthony Bourdain's from New Jersey, Dom's from New Jersey,’ and I would just be like, ‘That's true,” he laughs. “I don't really know what that means for me. But I guess if that makes me closer to the character in some way, then I'll take it.”

They’re also both men whose rise to fame came with a much-mythologized backstory. For Bourdain, it’s those humbling Provincetown summers that taught him how not to be “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” as he famously wrote.

For Sessa, it’s a plucked-from-obscurity tale that reads a bit like a modern version of Harrison Ford landing Star Wars because he was doing a carpentry job at the studio that day. Sessa, a high school ice hockey player sidelined by an injury, began to dabble in theater while attending the New England boarding school Deerfield Academy. As the story goes, by sheer luck, he soon ended up in front of Academy Award-winning director Alexander Payne, who had sent scouts to Deerfield to find young actors for his boarding school-set dramedy, 2023’s The Holdovers

The part about a lucky break throwing him onto Payne’s radar is true — a casting director did show up at the school. But the part about him being a jock who just wandered into a drama class and almost immediately took home a Critics’ Choice Award is a great story that, just like Bourdain’s, isn’t necessarily anchored in fact.

In reality, Sessa had experienced a moment of transformation a few years earlier, when, as a sophomore, he was given the male lead in his high school’s production of Antigone. Before that, Sessa remembers, acting “was always something that I used to add to my resume, like take an acting class, make sure it looks good when you apply to college, that sort of thing.” He had auditioned for the play just for fun, and was initially incredibly bummed to land a lead — “it's that very cliché situation where you get cast in lead role, and you're like ‘I don't want to play it, I don't want to do it, this is not what I signed up for.’”

After thinking it over, Sessa came around to the idea, even though spending a semester studying Sophocles had not previously been his idea of a good time — or, as he puts it, “I just kind of said fuck it, I'm gonna do this, and I'm going to try to do it to the best of my ability. And if I embarrass myself, then I can live with that. This might be social suicide, but whatever. I'm just gonna do it.”

Sessa spent his fall semester working “harder than I've ever worked on anything in my life doing this play,” and, in his words, his passionate portrayal of tragic villain King Creon “got such a good reception. All of my teachers came, and all of my friends came.” The experience not only changed Sessa’s view of himself; it gave him “power in a way. People were jealous that I was willing to do this sort of thing.” As he thought to himself, “I guess I'm going to keep doing this because it feels good.”

By his senior year, one thing became clear. “I don't want to go into finance; I don't know what the hell I would ever want to study or do with my life. I actually think this is the only thing I enjoy doing during the day, so I might as well just try to be an actor. And the idea of living in New York, and doing plays and small shows, and just kind of getting by was exciting to me. That's what I wanted to do, and I felt like I could do that. As long as I can just survive, that's my goal.”

Sessa Knows You Liked Him in ‘The Holdovers,’ but He Isn't Quite Sure Why

Angus (Dominic Sessa) and Hunham (Paul Giamatti) at an ice rink looking confused in The Holdovers.

It was around that point that the opportunity to audition for The Holdovers presented itself. Sessa’s performance as Angus, the neglected son of a wealthy family who spends a lonely Christmas break at boarding school bonding with a teacher (Paul Giamatti) and cafeteria worker (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), was an immediate critical sensation. He nabbed a Critics’ Choice Award and a BAFTA nomination right out of the gate, while Randolph won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, Giamatti was nominated for Best Actor, and the film was a contender for Best Film and Best Original Screenplay. It was one of the most critically adored films in a year that also included the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

Despite the acclaim he received from The Holdovers, Sessa now admits that “I didn't really know what I was doing, and I didn't know why people liked me in the movie. I didn't know what good acting was. I didn't know what to compare myself to, and say, ‘Oh yeah, what I was doing was good compared to that thing, or was not good compared to this thing.’ I didn't really know, but I knew that people felt something. And I wanted to do that again, but I didn't know how.”

I knew that people felt something. And I wanted to do that again, but I didn't know how.

It became time to attend “the best school you can have” by watching accomplished co-stars like Rose Byrne (who he shared the screen with in Tow) and Jesse Eisenberg (who mentored him on screen as one of a new generation of magician-criminals in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t) ply their craft.

“Over the past couple years after [The Holdovers], that was my goal: to work towards something that made people feel something at least a little bit in the way that that movie did. I worked, prepared really hard, and made sure I was on as many sets as possible,” Sessa explains. “ By the time Tony came around, he adds, “I felt really ready to try to do that level of work again.”

In Johnson’s film, Sessa found a place to work out all of those experiences, to both dramatize and build upon them on the screen. “I'm always trying to use my work as a way to express my experience and the things that are true to me and relatable to people. And I saw in this the opportunity to have a lot of agency with that,” he says. The film’s loose relationship with the facts meant that even when he was Tony, he could still be Dominic — and, instead of telling the official story, he could tell a true story. “I wasn't bound to try to sound exactly like him or walk exactly like him,” which left Sessa free to “find the deeper connections in what it means to be an impressionable young guy experiencing crazy mentors — that was something that was exciting to me and something that I wanted to talk about. And he was just kind of the perfect person — at least Matt and I thought — to use as sort of the vessel to express that.”

Sessa Likes Doing the Work

Am I making all of this sound too serious? It wasn’t — spending months in Cape Cod “felt like vacation.” “We didn't have room for such a big crew or setup, really,” so Tony’s small production became close quickly. Sessa and co-star Emilia Jones, who plays his conflicted love interest Nancy, did barroom karaoke the first night they arrived in town, and “we all went swimming in the ocean at night.” Like Bourdain and so many others before him, he now understands the town’s enchanting nature. “It's such a really kind of remote place with one main road,” he recalls. “It was a really magical place. I think the reason we all bonded really closely was because we were in a place like that.”

And if you were worried about all the agonizing Sessa previously mentioned about wanting his co-stars to trust him as a performer, don’t be: “They're my friends now, so it's all good.”

Tony’s limited release has earned rapturous reviews and even a spot among the box office’s top 10 films, despite only showing in a handful of theaters. And Sessa’s performance, for the second time in a career that’s only three years old, is already getting strong awards buzz.

But Sessa isn’t getting a big head about it. In fact, he’s not even fully convinced he’ll get a bigger career out of it. “I always still feel like I don't know if I'm gonna do another movie,” he laughs. “There's always that anxiety, I think, this impending doom of it all just kind of ending. I don't know, maybe it's a good thing or a bad thing.” He pauses, thinks it over for a second. “Good that it keeps you motivated.”

Impending doom might be a motivator, but watching Sessa act out Bourdain’s origin story makes me wonder if this is the true value of any origin story: to help us understand our personal motivations. Those young, unformed, messy versions of ourselves that we’re so eager to stop being might actually be where our drive comes from later in life. Maybe the value in watching — or making — an origin story is in remembering to listen to those defining years.

If the essence of everything Anthony Bourdain ever did can be found in a crowded, smoky Provincetown kitchen, maybe the essence of everything Dominic Sessa has done and will ever do can be found in that prep school auditorium, where he let a 2,400-year-old play change his life. “I feel like I'm still doing everything for the same reason,” he says. “I just liked doing the work.”

Photography: Lenne Chai | Photo Assistant: Chris Tse | Styling: Warren Alfie Baker