Dominic Sessa Says Antonio Banderas Gave Him ‘a Lot of Important Relationship Advice’ on “Tony” Set (Exclusive)

Antonio Banderas and Dominic Sessa costar as a Provincetown, Mass. chef and a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain in the 1970s-set ‘Tony’

NEED TO KNOW

• Dominic Sessa tells PEOPLE all about working with Antonio Banderas and the advice he received from the Spanish actor on the set of Tony
• Sessa portrays a young Anthony Bourdain who works for Banderas’ no-nonsense chef in Provincetown, Mass.
• Tony is in select theaters now and begins playing everywhere Aug. 21

Antonio Banderas mentored Dominic Sessa both on-screen in Tony and when the cameras weren’t rolling at all.

Sessa, 23, and the movie’s director, Matt Johnson, recently spoke with PEOPLE about working with Banderas, 66, on the new movie, which is based on the life of Anthony Bourdain and his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

“He gave me a lot of advice. A lot of important relationship advice was given,” Sessa says, with a laugh. “That was a big takeaway from Antonio.”

Banderas, of course, is an expert in relationships within the entertainment industry. He was married to Melanie Griffith between 1996 and 2014 and told PEOPLE recently that Griffith, 69, remains “one of my best friends” even more than a decade after their divorce.

In Tony, Sessa portrays a 19-year-old Bourdain, who travels to Provincetown, Mass., on a whim in hopes of impressing a girl (Emilia Jones) by lying about receiving a fellowship to write a novel. When he finds himself penniless and alone, he begrudgingly accepts an offer to wash dishes at a local seafood restaurant operated by a no-nonsense chef (Banderas) for the summer and eventually comes to enjoy learning the ins and outs of the restaurant world from his accidental mentor.

“It’s hard sometimes when you work with people like that, in terms of taking something away, because somehow they make it look really easy,” Sessa adds, regarding what else he learned from working with Banderas. “Antonio seamlessly just came on set and started doing his thing, and it seemed like he wasn’t really trying that hard, you know? But I guess in reality, he’s thinking a lot about it and being very thoughtful, but his process never gets in the way of anything else going on or the other actors.”

He continues, “He was very easy to work with because he’s talented, and I think that’s the biggest thing about working with professional actors. You don’t have to try too hard to get the dialogue to work.”

“And when the dialogue’s not working, you know it’s not the actor’s fault, that’s for sure,” writer-director Johnson, 40, chimes in. “Because it’s not like these guys are struggling to do a real performance. It’s my problem in giving them bad dialogue, which honestly happened often enough that I started to rely on them as a barometer for when the writing was good.”

Though Johnson will not divulge how Banderas may have reacted to scenes that needed punching up, he says Sessa “would just look at me and be like, ‘Dude, what the f— is this?’ ”

Banderas and Sessa costar in Tony with Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias, who round out the crew of restaurant cooks who show Bourdain the ropes and inspire him to pursue a career as a chef. Bourdain died at 61 in 2018, nearly two decades after he found fame through his memoir and hosted multiple successful travel and food shows.

Dagmara Dominiczyk and Rich Sommer also star in the movie as Bourdain’s parents.

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Tony is in select theaters now and begins playing everywhere Aug. 21.