With regards to the late Anthony Bourdain, Paula Deen nonetheless has an ax to grind, apparently. Deen dissed her fellow celeb chef within the new documentary Canceled: The Paula Deen Story.
The doc, which premiered on Saturday on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition, covers the rise and fall of Deen’s profession and consists of protection of her confrontation with Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018.
“God relaxation his soul,” Deen says within the movie, per Leisure Weekly. “I felt like he didn’t like anyone. Not even himself, perhaps.”
In her interview within the movie, the Southern chef additionally revisits Bourdain calling her “the worst, most harmful” particular person in America.
“The worst, most harmful particular person to America is clearly Paula Deen,” he instructed TV Information Journal in 2011. “She revels in unholy connections with evil companies, and she or he’s pleased with the truth that her meals is f***ing unhealthy for you.”
In that very same interview, Bourdain additionally stated Deen’s meals “sucks,” and within the documentary, Deen’s son Bobby dismisses these two assertions. “I believe each are inaccurate,” he says.
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Canceled additionally sees Deen criticizing Bourdain’s culinary adventures around the globe in TV exhibits like Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Anthony Bourdain: Components Unknown.
“I don’t know what he was off in these international nations consuming. Bat brains or one thing like that,” she says. “I believe I’ll simply stick to my fried hen.”
Deen spoke alongside comparable traces throughout a 2011 look on The Pleasure Behar Present, per EW: “Let me inform you one thing, girlfriend,” she stated then. “Perhaps [my food] is unhealthy for you, however I don’t go round consuming or serving unwashed anuses of wildebeests.”
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There’s no file of Bourdain consuming bat brains or wildebeest anuses, although he did eat warthog anus as he traveled with indigenous Namibians in a No Reservation episode, per Chowhound. “Lesson one as a traveler: Meals given as a gesture of hospitality is all the time gratefully accepted, all the time,” he stated in that episode. “As a result of irrespective of how bizarre or horrible it might appear to you, for another person, it’s their technique of subsistence.”
In response to EW, Deen expresses remorse over the feud with Bourdain within the documentary. “He began one thing with me, and I’d by no means even met him,” she says.
Canceled: The Paula Deen Story is the work of documentary filmmaker Billy Corben (Cocaine Cowboys) and tracks Deen’s profession from her beginnings as a Georgia caterer and chef to her fame as a Meals Community star to her cancellation amid a racial-slur scandal.
“You could assume you already know the story of Paula Deen, however Corben uncovers views and gradations that complicate anybody’s sizzling take,” Thom Powers, lead documentary programmer on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition, writes in a blurb about Canceled. “Twelve years after Deen’s downfall, this movie explores what it means once we construct up celebrities after which tear them down.”