Anthony Bourdain’s forgotten 2008 movie with the worst director of all time: “He was never disturbing the work”
Even though he was a regular fixture onscreen for years as the host of countless food and travel-related TV shows, Anthony Bourdain never fancied himself as an actor, which did nothing to prevent him from collaborating with arguably the worst director in cinema history.
Whenever Bourdain appeared onscreen, he was almost always playing himself. In fact, his only notable outing in a feature film came when he made a cameo in Adam McKay’s The Big Short as himself. Apart from that, his non-fictional legacy was almost exclusively restricted to animated voiceover work.
He voiced himself in an episode of The Simpsons, voiced an exaggerated version of himself as reality TV chef Lance Casteau in an episode of Archer, and he voiced another extension of himself, Anthony Gourmand, in an episode of Nickelodeon’s Sanjay and Craig, which is hardly the most extensive filmography.
Bourdain had one more fictional film and television credit to his name, though, and it stuck out like a sore thumb. For seemingly no reason at all, he popped up in an uncredited role as a scientist in Far Cry, the 2008 video game adaptation from Uwe Boll, a filmmaker who built their infamy on atrocious video game adaptations.
The controversial and hot-headed German, who’s never made a picture that’s anything other than a wretched pile of shite, has somehow managed to enjoy a lengthy career behind the camera, despite being so terrible at his job that he might well be the worst to have ever entered the profession.
And yet, he holds the distinction of being the only person to cast Bourdain as a fictional character in a live-action production. How did it come about? As it turned out, the two had already been friendly for years, and with Far Cry shooting in Vancouver, where he was shooting an episode of No Reservations, he reached out to Boll and asked for a small part to highlight the city as a hotbed of food and filmmaking.
“He learned to fall down after a gunshot, and it’s hard,” the director reflected. “He is a person who makes everybody feel good. He brought that on set in Vancouver, too. Everybody was around him, everybody talked about him. But he was never disturbing the work.” Naturally, Boll also saw something of himself in Bourdain, even if only one of them didn’t spend their career committing crimes against their craft.
“I’m a big critic of myself, I’m a big critic of anybody else, too,” the worst director of all time succinctly put it, which isn’t inaccurate, since he’s prone to tantrums and occasionally boxing people who talk shit about his films. “In that point of view, he had a life like a maverick, and I, in a way, too, in a different business.”
Like every single other one of Boll’s credits, Far Cry was an awful, awful thing, even by the lowered standards of video game adaptations, but it nonetheless holds a bizarre place in history as Bourdain’s solitary movie appearance where he wasn’t playing himself.
