How Jay McCarrol helped Matt Johnson find the sound of Anthony Bourdain biopic ‘Tony’

TORONTO — Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s creative partnership began with a decidedly sombre project.

The Toronto duo met as teenagers after Johnson’s then-girlfriend introduced them. Johnson wanted to make films; McCarrol dreamed of scoring them. McCarrol soon scored one of Johnson’s student features.

“It was about the son of an actor, whose father is struck deaf by an on-set lighting mistake,” recalled Johnson at last year’s TIFF. “And to deal with it, he sublimates his father’s deafness into his own inability to speak.”

“It was very dark. It was serious,” said McCarrol.

It’s an unlikely origin story for the pair who would go on to create and co-star in “Nirvanna the Band the Show,” the defiantly silly Canadian comedy series whose feature-film adaptation became a surprise hit earlier this year.

Their latest collaboration brings them closer to those early dramatic instincts: “Tony,” Johnson’s new biopic about the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain.

The A24 film stars Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain, an ambitious but adrift wannabe novelist who lands a summer job at a Cape Cod seafood joint. There, a Brazilian chef played by Antonio Banderas attempts to knock some humility into the self-important young writer. The drama draws from Bourdain’s bestselling 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.”

Johnson was hardly a Bourdain fan before taking on the project: “I want to make movies about things that I really know nothing about, so that I can be interested in them and not an expert,” he said in a recent interview.

What he did recognize was the restless ambition of a young person trying to make something of himself — a feeling he and McCarrol knew well as teenagers.

“It’s so bizarre because to meet somebody at such a young age where both parties have an idea of what it is that they want to do, that’s quite rare.”

McCarrol has scored all of Johnson’s films, including his 2023 tech dramedy “BlackBerry,” which won a record 14 Canadian Screen Awards, including best score for its frenetic, video game-inspired soundscape. But “Tony” called for something different.

“It was very fun to go from ‘Nirvanna’ being such a huge, bombastic, sweeping orchestra, adventure movie sound, to ‘Tony,’ which was just so minimal and small and warm and low on the piano, focusing on just one man,” McCarrol said.

While the soundtrack is playful and breezy — punctuated by a perfectly timed needle drop of Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” — McCarrol’s score is melancholic and restrained.

McCarrol says he wanted to tap into the young Bourdain’s “dark and brooding” side, using recurring musical ideas to capture his uncertainty.

“He’s really finding out how he’s building himself,” McCarrol said. “A motif gets stretched to be optimistic, and it’s stretched the other way to become dark.”

For Johnson, the piano- and accordion-led score became a primary storytelling tool. Since Bourdain rarely articulates what he’s feeling on screen, the music provides a window into his interior life.

“The score was going to be the only way to get inside this kid’s head, because he never had scenes with someone he trusted,” Johnson said.

He points to a scene where Bourdain fails to get a scholarship and punches a hole in a Bruce Lee poster.

“He’s clearly ticked off, but the subtlety of it and the sadness — it’s not rage as much as it is a kind of hopeless disappointment, and ‘I’ll never amount to anything’ — that’s what Jay’s trying to play,” Johnson said.

SCRAPPY TORONTO TEAM MEETS HOLLYWOOD MACHINE

“Tony” marks Johnson’s first film in the American studio system, with its Massachusetts shoot taking him away from the Toronto-based Zapruder Films production team that has long been part of his process.

McCarrol says the experience exposed him to a more regulated production environment, with stricter rules around unions, actors and what filmmakers can do on set.

“I think where the movie started to really come alive is when Matt returned to Canada, and all of us at Zapruder got to weigh in and watch it and discuss how to support certain sections, fix certain sections,” said McCarrol. “It’s a very collaborative process.”

McCarrol is involved from the earliest stages of Johnson’s films, reading scripts and joining story meetings long before he begins writing music.

“By the time we’re making the score, we really don’t need to discuss what the goal is,” he said. “We know it. We’re in lockstep.”

Johnson is happy to let McCarrol follow his instincts.

“I know nothing about music,” he said.

“He really is the head of that department. He’s writing things that feel right to him, and that he wants to see in the film, and then I’m trying to add my two cents as best I can.”

That shorthand will continue in Johnson’s next film, with McCarrol executive producing and scoring the story of a Vice Canada editor who dives into drug smuggling.

In the meantime, the pair are dealing with an unexpected consequence of their “Nirvanna” success: becoming internet heartthrobs.

“Matt and I have, in some corners of the internet, just been turned into sex dolls. Hey, look, we deserve every bit of it — it’s all on screen,” McCarrol quips.

He says the online fandom runs “the spectrum from fun and cute to downright freaky,” and includes a fair share of Nirvanna the Band fan fiction.

“I’ve been given a few artists’ renditions of Matt and I with our arms around each other, kissing,” he says.

“We like it.”

‘Tony’ hits theatres in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Friday, with a nationwide rollout to follow Aug. 21.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 13, 2026.

Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press