Cherry Hill native Dominic Sessa spent four summers making doughnuts at a Jersey Shore bakery before landing the role of young Anthony Bourdain in A24's "Tony."

Sessa, 23, started as a 13-year-old dishwasher at Cathy's 14th Street Bakery in Ocean City in 2016. By his last shift in 2019, he was a full-fledged baker, clocking in at 4:30 a.m. to roll out dough, monitor proofing batches and fry the shop's famous powdered and cream-filled doughnuts from scratch, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

At its busiest, the pink-and-white storefront sells between 1,200 and 1,400 doughnuts a day, according to owner Cathy Greene.

"If I didn't show up on time, everything would be messed up, and everyone would know it was [because of] me," Sessa told the Inquirer.

Sessa plays a 19-year-old Bourdain in "Tony," directed by Matt Johnson. The film follows Bourdain in the summer of 1973 as he lands a dishwasher job at a Provincetown, Mass., seafood shack and grows into something resembling a cook. Antonio Banderas plays the tough-but-kind chef who takes him on.

Born in Cherry Hill, Sessa grew up in Egg Harbor Township and Ocean City. His mother was a teacher; his father worked in payroll.

Hockey, not acting, was his focus until a femur injury steered him toward theater. Director Alexander Payne discovered him at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and cast him in the 2023 comedy "The Holdovers."

Greene remembers Sessa as a standout among the teenagers she has hired over the years. She recalled quizzing him on three-digit multiplication while they rolled dough side by side, and said he always answered correctly off the top of his head. She called him a natural.

Not every shift went smoothly. Once, Sessa threw out a batch of dough loaded with too much yeast. The dough nearly quintupled in size, billowing out of the trash cans and onto the kitchen floor.

Greene said she has not yet seen "Tony" but is proud of the role her bakery played in helping Sessa prepare for the part. "I don't want to be the one who is like, 'Oh, I had Dominic Sessa here,'" she told the Inquirer. "But it's pretty cool."

"Tony" opened Aug. 21 and earned $5 million from about 1,650 screens in its wide-release weekend, landing at No. 7 on the box office charts with a cumulative gross of $6.6 million, Deadline reported. The film holds a 95% critics score and 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

As we reported Aug. 21, co-star Banderas praised Sessa's work in a GQ interview, saying he "understood the complexity of the character" and calling him "a real actor."

Bourdain, who drew on his early kitchen years for his bestselling memoir "Kitchen Confidential," died by suicide in 2018 at age 61.

If you are having suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.