In February, beloved celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain sat down for one of his last interviews.
While filming his CNN series “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” Bourdain revealed that he was far from retiring. He told People magazine, “I gave up on that. I’ve tried. I just think I’m just too nervous, neurotic, driven. I would have had a different answer a few years ago. I might have deluded myself into thinking that I’d be happy in a hammock or gardening. But no, I’m quite sure I can’t.”
He continued, “I’m going to pretty much die in the saddle.”
Bourdain also noted that he felt “some responsibility” to live for his daughter, Ariane, 11. He explained, “I also do feel I have things to live for. There have been times, honestly, in my life that I figured, ‘I’ve had a good run — why not just do this stupid thing, this selfish thing… jump off a cliff into water of indeterminate depth.”
Before welcoming his daughter, he noted that he was “frankly, asking for trouble.”
A source close to Bourdain recently opened up on his inner demons, saying, “I guess the darkness just finally overtook him. That’s the thing about him and he’d have been the first to say it — his dark side was always there, but it’s like the darkness was always just a few steps behind him, it was like he’d managed to outrun it, literally, with this life of far-flung adventures and everything. But it was never really gone.”
“He always had a very, very dark side,” the insider went on. “And the same things that drove him to heroin, those demons are never fully banished, they’re just controlled. But he still had them.”
Bourdain’s death came a “shock” for his friend, who emphasized, “I can’t believe it would happen while he was in the middle of working. If there was one thing that was always his saving grace, it was his ability to throw himself into his work — he was never happier than when he was on some adventure or in the middle of a project, so it’s so bizarre to me, and I’m sure to many people who knew him, that of all the times, this happened when he was doing what he loved and with people he loves.”
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