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.
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Director Matt Johnson Didn’t Understand the Anthony Bourdain Hype When He Signed on for A24’s ‘Tony’
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?”
The story is inspired by true events that saw a Vice Canada editor recruit drug mules for an international cocaine smuggling operation, including out of the media giant’s offices. Wolfhard will play the Canadian investigative journalist who helped break the story.
“In the past 12 hours since the premiere, I’ve had endless conversations with people asking me what is real and what isn’t,” says Johnson. “The best answer that I can give is that the things people think we faked we really did, and the things that people haven’t even thought of, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on VFX to make it look like it happened. Now, at the CN Tower, we’re playing all kinds of tricks. … It would have been international news otherwise.”
Each episode follows two zoo animals – excitable monkey Matt (voiced by Johnson) and a quieter bird named Bird (McCarrol) – who attempt to escape into the outside world. Combining hand-drawn animation that recalls Canadian studio Nelvana at its Babar peak with an improv-comedy sensibility familiar to the NTBTS fanbase, Matt & Bird is both nostalgic and refreshing. There is no garish CGI (hello, Cocomelon and Pinkfong), no irritating cutesy performances (stop it, Blippy) and no corporate mandate to push toys (Paw Patrol, Bakugan).
To understand just how much of a game changer nirvanna the band the show is, it’s best to start with describing what it isn’t. It is not a sloppily spelled Kurt Cobain cover group. Nor is it an ode to Buddhist enlightenment. It’s not about a band or even a show, in the traditional sense. Instead, nirvanna the band the show is a new television series courtesy of Viceland – a wild, subversive, mostly unclassifiable work of new-media pastiche that might save its upstart network, cement the bona fides of its polarizing co-creator and, just maybe, revolutionize the Canadian television landscape.
*correction – Barry claims Matt and Jay are the same age at time of writing (32), but we believe technically Matt was 31, and Jay would have been 33.