CULTURE

Roadrunner Trailer: Remembering the Iconoclastic Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain in a kitchen
Photo by Dmitri Kasterine via Focus Features

Next week marks three years since the world learned of Anthony Bourdain’s untimely death at age 61, but the beloved chef, writer, and documentarian’s legacy lives on. That’s in part because there are hundreds upon hundreds of hours of him touring the world, chiefly while filming his hit 12-season CNN show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. It’s no longer on Netflix, but you can soon watch the highlights in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, an upcoming documentary directed by the Oscar winner Morgan Neville, who was behind the 2018 Mr. Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor?.

The trailer that dropped on Thursday teases a celebration of Bourdain’s life, with tributes from friends like The Kills’s Alison Mosshart. Still, you may want to have some tissues on hand. “So here’s a little preemptive truth-telling,” Bourdain says in the opening voiceover. “There’s no happy ending.”

From there, the trailer throws back to Bourdain’s beginnings as a chef, most prominently at the Manhattan restaurant Brasserie Les Halles. And then, with the publication of his bestseller Kitchen Confidential in 2000, everything changed. (Bourdain wrote extensively, though even then was apparently still typing with his pointer fingers.) “One minute I was standing next to a deep fryer, and the next I was watching the sun set over the Sahara,” he says over footage of him in a kitchen, positively drenched in sweat. “What am I doing here?

Watch the trailer for the doc, which premieres at this month’s Tribeca Film Festival and hits theaters on July 16, below.