'Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain' Explores Celebrity Chef's Public Humiliation Before Death

The documentary, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” offers a glimpse of the renowned celebrity chef’s final days, and the public humiliation he had to endure before his death.

While the documentary memorializes Bourdain’s vivid life and his painful death in 2018 for the most part through interviews and archival clips delving into his battles with addiction, mental health and quest for contentment, it also explores his controversial relationship with his last girlfriend, Italian actress and director Asia Argento, whose infidelity made headlines days before Bourdain’s death, New York Post reported.

Bourdain and Argento first met while filming “Parts Unknown” in Rome. In the documentary, film producer Chris Collins describes Bourdain’s infatuation with Argento as teenage-like, comparing it to an addiction. But, Collins also recalled how Bourdain referred to Argento as “the crazy Italian actress,” saying things would end “very, very badly.”

“There was a very sort of manic nature to what was going on in that last year,” said Collins. “The highs were very, very high, and the lows were very ugly.”

Days before the celebrity chef’s death, photographs of Argento with French reporter Hugo Clement made the rounds online and hit the newspapers. Director Michael Steed of Bourdain's popular show “Parts Unknown” recalls checking up on him shortly after Argento’s scandal broke. He quoted the chef as telling him, “A little f****** discretion.”

The response was allegedly in reference to Argento being so public with the infidelity.

Asked why he did not interview Argento for the documentary, “Roadrunner” director Morgan Neville told Rolling Stone he did not intend to make it look like the former made Bourdain kill himself. He noted, however, the Italian actress said “the same thing” in every interview, that what she and Bourdain had was an open relationship.

“Believe me, we thought a lot about whether to include Argento,” he said. “I looked at everything that she had said publicly in the wake of his death, including an autobiography she published in Italy, and interviews she gave in England. It’s all a version of the same thing, which is kind of, ‘People don’t understand me and our relationship. I loved him,’” he explained.

Neville also said he believed it was humiliation, not heartbreak, that made Bourdain take his life. “My take is that the thing that Tony was having the hardest time with was humiliation. He has taken himself so far out on the limb to be made to feel like a chump so publicly. That was the thing—not heartbreak. Humiliation,” he said, Grub Street reported.