'Tony': When Does The Anthony Bourdain Biopic Take Place?

Tony (2026) is A24’s reimagining of Anthony Bourdain’s younger years. The celebrity chef known for his cutting tongue and creative strengths spoke about his life in books and documentaries, describing someone who found himself in the kitchen while a prickly college student. Whereas most biopics fully delve into the overall life of their subject matter, Tony remains fixed on a single summer.

This is to the benefit of the film, which works better as a character study and dramedy than it likely would have as a more traditional biopic. While some elements of Tony were played up for drama or tweaked for narrative purposes, a lot of aspects of the movie, like its setting and time period, are reflective of the true story. As a result of this focus and how it ends, it’s easy to tell where a prospective sequel could go.

Tony Takes Place In 1975 Cape Cod

Tony is firmly set in 1975, focusing heavily on a fictionalized version of the cook’s formative years. After presumably being born in 1956 like his inspiration, Tony is a cocky undergraduate student when he’s introduced in Tony. Emboldened by the kind of ego one only gets when you’re still a teenager, the film follows a cocky Tony’s efforts to win over a girl even after his means to stay in Cape Cod near her (in the form of a writing fellowship through his school) falls through.

The 1970s aesthetic is filtered throughout the entire film, with the music, fashion, and culture being reflective of that period. This extends to the casualness of drug use by some people, as well as the sheltered suburban life that Tony is inherently rebelling against by going down this path. Most of the film embraces Cape Cod (located in Massachusetts) as a rich background setting for the character and his growth.

How Tony Focuses On A Reimagining Of A Young Anthony Bourdain 

Tony isn’t strictly a one-to-one accurate biography of Anthony Bourdain’s life, instead choosing to reflect recollections from his memoir and keep true to the spirit of the famous cook. During an interview with IndieWire, Tony director Matt Johnson revealed that he took direct inspiration from two chapters of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. 

The film is a clear adaptation, taking three summers’ worth of work at Provincetown restaurants and compressing them into a single self-contained summer. The film even brings in people from later in his life as the inspiration for Antonio Banderas’ Chef while inventing new roles for Tony’s mother and love interest in his narrative. This is even reflective of the way Bourdain’s memoirs often self-edited or tweaked past events, reflecting the kinetic perspective and personality of the celebrity chef.

That’s very much at the root of Tony, which doesn’t go the route of other contemporary biopics like Michael (2026) and focuses on the most famous and iconic moments of his life. Instead, Tony tries to be a character study on the kind of person Tony was and how he grew to become Anthony. It’s a more compelling film as a result, even if it invents and exaggerates things for the sake of the story.

Does Tony Set Up A Sequel (And Where Would It Take Place)?

Tony is more or less an ideal self-contained film, a depiction of a single summer where an aggressive young man is forced to mature in some key ways. However, there is room for a potential sequel, given how the film ends. Instead of returning to Vassar College and reuniting with Nancy at the top of the new school year, Tony enrolls in a culinary school. With Chef’s recommendation going a long way toward impressing the teaching staff, Anthony is accepted into a cooking program despite his relative lack of experience. 

A sequel to Tony could follow this version of Anthony as he makes his way through cooking school, potentially even shifting to his early jobs in fine kitchens and his rise to fame. It seems unlikely that it would be a glossy biopic, but something akin to The Bear (2022) could be a good way to retain the raw qualities of Tony while still escalating the stakes like a good sequel should. Tony isn’t necessarily calling for a sequel, but it wouldn’t be hard to figure out where one could go.