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“Within 30 minutes, I was like, ‘Dom, we’re going to make this movie about Anthony Bourdain.’ It was us getting excited about exactly the things you see in the movie,” Johnson recalls. “A young man lying to create status. What’s it like to have all your self-worth tied up in how women see you. The power of homosocial relationships as a developmental tool. And then my job was to bring Bourdain into this conspiracy and read everything that he’d written and go, ‘Okay, let’s see where you agree with us.’”
“Don’t write where we’re eating,” Matt Johnson told me recently over a very tasty plate of chicken and naan.
It’s not that the 40-year-old writer-director doesn’t want to give some shine to one of his favourite local restaurants, which would not be a bad strategy considering he’s promoting a biopic about Anthony Bourdain, the two-fisted coming-of-age comedy “Tony,” shot on Cape Cod and starring Dominic Sessa as the late chef and gourmet media star.
“For about five, six years, I had been dealing with the notion of people in Toronto meeting me in the street, walking down Ossington, Roncesvalles or whatever, and having an idea of who I am because of what I am like on television, so to speak. Having to really deal with the idea that people have a different idea of me than what I really am,” he explains. “Am I gonna be the person that people view me as, or is that fraudulent, in a way?”
In the wake of his two buzzy 2026 movies, Johnson is staying busy. He directed comedian and Tony actor Stavros Halkias’s upcoming Netflix special Uncle Stav. He’s developing a Toronto crime movie starring Finn Wolfhard for Neon, as well as a TSA comedy with Josh Safdie for A24. And he’s currently hard at work on a live-action Magic: The Gathering feature, while also chasing down a green light for the long-awaited third season of Nirvanna the Band the Show.
In recent years, Canadian director Matt Johnson has served up two unexpected exceptions to the biopic trap. His 2023 “BlackBerry,” about the rapid rise and fall of the breakthrough smartphone, is a workplace comedy turned late capitalist tragedy with a “Succession”-like lack of reverence for its subjects. And his new film “Tony,” about the summer a young Anthony Bourdain spent working in a Provincetown kitchen, works as a coming-of-age film, regardless if you know its miserable 20-year old protagonist, played by Dominic Sessa, will become the beloved writer, chef, and “Parts Unknown” host.
The podcast mentioned at the end of the article is linked below; the Spotify version includes full video of the interview.
Over lunch, Johnson and Sessa talk about depicting a globally admired figure on screen, what his story can teach us about both mentorship and self-discovery, and how it inspired their own close-knit friendship.
Director Matt Johnson Didn’t Understand the Anthony Bourdain Hype When He Signed on for A24’s ‘Tony’
After BlackBerry, I was getting inundated with real-life stories, whether it was tech stories or some crazy real-life article that was being turned into a movie. The reason I made BlackBerry was not because I particularly like that style of story. I was compelled by the characters. This was no different. I was pitched an Anthony Bourdain movie, which had a script, and I was completely and totally uninterested. Mostly because, not only did I not want to make another real-life story in that way, but I don’t know anything about Anthony Bourdain. Then I went to New York and I had heard that Dominic Sessa had just moved there, and I’d always wanted to meet with him because I’m very interested in him as an actor. I really loved him in The Holdovers. I went to lunch with him and my producer Matt Miller, and an hour into this lunch we had come up with what the Anthony Bourdain movie was going to be.
Housed in a striking, light-wood Scandinavian space in Queen West, chef Matty Matheson’s wood-fired steak and seafood restaurant elevates classic butcher cuts and coastal delicacies into a sleek dining destination.
Why Matt loves it: “If you’re wondering where all the famous Americans go, you just found ‘em. Lobster Spaghetti at $50/forkful that will have you saying ‘damn that’s good value.’ If you order the whole menu, Matty Matheson comes out and recites lines from ‘The Bear.’”
Johnson took the stage first, thanking the crowd, who were cheering loudly. After introducing himself as Matt, he told the crowd that he worked for Live Nation and “had some kind of bad news.” According to Johnson, Wolfhard’s band wouldn’t be able to take the stage, but Wolfhard himself would still be there and play some music for the attendees.
Instead, he brought out McCarrol, in his Fire from the Hip attire, which elicited many screams from the audience. “Hi everyone, I’m Finn,” he said. The comedic pair launched into a back-and-forth before Johnson asked a key question. “Is there anything you want to see before you leave Toronto?”