EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Bourdain’s renegade sushi chef hits screens later this year when Get Jiro bows on Adult Swim. Series creator Alessandro Tanaka dropped by Deadline’s SXSW London Live Studio to tell us what to expect, including Titus Welliver (Bosch), Alison Pill (Scott Pilgrim) and Justin Kirk (Weeds) joining the voice cast alongside the previously-announced Brian Tee (Chicago Med).
“Bourdain’s whole mantra was just food brings us together… and then there’s a lot of blood and violence in between [in Get Jiro], but ultimately that’s the takeaway,” Tanaka said of the series, which he created with Brian Gatewood.
Based on the New York Times bestselling DC/Vertigo graphic novels from Bourdain and Joel Rose, with artwork by Langdon Foss and Alé Garza, the story follows a solitary sushi chef, Jiro. The ten episode Warner Bros. Animation-produced show will take viewers to a dystopian LA by way of Tokyo.
“Everybody’s needs are being met digitally, whether it’s sex or travel, you can put on goggles and go anywhere, but the one thing you cannot do is eat and taste food, and because of that, chefs have become the most powerful people in Los Angeles,” Tanaka said, unpacking the plot.
“They’re like gangsters as they take each other out. The comic starts where this mysterious Japanese sushi chef (Jiro) lands in Los Angeles, and he starts playing everyone against each other. As the series continues, we see that there’s a whole method to his madness, and the entire thing is like him creating a recipe for the grand finale. A lot of food, mayhem and violence happens.”
Given the Bourdain heritage of the project, the pressure was on to make sure the food scenes were completely on point. “We really needed to make sure, obviously, that we got the food right,” Tanaka said. “We got this guy named Matt Goulding, who was a coworker and a very good friend of Bourdain’s. He would read every script, look at every animatic and watch every episode.”
The series leans into different cinematic influences. “Kurosawa was a big part of the comic, it feels a lot like Yojimbo,” Tanaka said. “We’re dealing with such a cinephile [in Bourdain], and Brian and I are also huge lovers of cinema, so we wanted to make sure that every episode had a very cinematic flair.”
With two comics as source material, the team expanded the story and roster of characters for a ten-part series.
“We had to expand on what was already there, which includes creating a couple of new characters, some extra storylines,” Tanaka said. “There’s one [new] villain, and we’ll just refer to him as the cannibal, that hopefully people will enjoy, but mostly it was about taking the characters that were already there and just deepening them and finding more about them.”
A24’s Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony premieres in August, and he remains an enduring cultural figure. Tanaka spoke about whether he felt the weight of expectation. “There was pressure going in because [Bourdain’s] presence looms very strongly over this, but I think he would be very happy with what we did, and I think we did right by him.”
