A possible audition (and a damaged femur) led to a role in Alexander Payne’s residential school drama, The Holdovers, and the beginning of a life. Its star’s next ambition? Appearing in videos without looking famous
Dominic Sessa wasn’t thinking about videos when he entered his senior year of top school at Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts. The original hockey plan: Sessa, a scholarship student from southern New Jersey, knew that New England high schools are a launching pad for a school career. But a fractured femur and the winter demands of school led him to the theater, which he took on like a fish in water. So, a new plan: maybe a drama school. But in the fall of 2021, while Sessa was starring in a student production of Neil Simon’s Rumours, she was asked by her theater instructor to audition for a Hollywood casting director who was looking for Deerfield as a possible filming location.
The movie The Holdovers, a bittersweet 70s comedy-drama about an unlikely trio stranded at a boarding school at Christmas. Director Alexander Payne, known for his dark and emotionally rich films such as Election, Sideways, and The Descendants. Sessa won a call from Payne two weeks later. “I thought, ‘Wow, this super talented guy is coming to see me in the middle of nowhere in Massachusetts,'” she recalled recently. “If it had ended like this, I would have been as satisfied as I am today. “
It didn’t end there. Several auditions later, Sessa was cast as one of the leads in what was his film debut – though you wouldn’t know it from his performance. As Angus Tully, a sullen, unmoored teenager left behind for the holidays, Sessa more than holds his own against Paul Giamatti, playing the crotchety professor tasked with babysitting him, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the fictional Barton Academy’s head chef, who recently lost her only son in Vietnam.
Green beans and angular face, Sessa looks young or old. Their narrowed eyes can gently express a teenager’s disgust or disdain; The bags underneath seem to recommend an old soul. (Or, as one X user described it: “Joan Cusack if I were a twenty-something. Son Angus is a plausible misanthrope hungry for connection after his mother and new stepfather summarily abandoned their Christmas plans for a honeymoon without him. He reluctantly discovers it in the temper of a grumpy guy and the corporate tranquility of a grieving mother. Timely, sarcastic, and with just the right amount of sweetness, Sessa’s debut seemed, rightly, like one of the standout performances of this awards season.
When I meet Sessa, in a hotel suite on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he’s in the middle of his “first month of promotion,” and he’s staying with his mother in Jersey when he’s not traveling to events. Array Now 21, dressed merrily in a black T-shirt and jacket, still with his character’s mop of hair and a muted edition of ’70s favorites, Sessa is more laid-back than Angus, quick to laugh or think, giving the impression not only of a smart student but also of a smart jock. The character isn’t that far away from him, as they’ve both experienced the isolated world of New England boarding schools and are outsiders, in their own way. Angus is a loner hardened by money and the absence of a father. Sessa’s mom is a teacher; His father died when he was 14 years old. As a financial aid student at a school known as the Ivy League pipeline, “I just made sure I did everything I could and excelled at everything I could,” Array said.
He didn’t necessarily feel like an outsider. “It’s not like my friends treated me differently. We were all high-school kids. But it was definitely weird when you see your friends’ parents pull up in a black SUV or whatever, and a helicopter take off.” (This is the school where Taylor Swift once flew to visit her then beau, Conor Kennedy, RFK’s grandson.)
“A lot of the kids I went to school with have this very defined path of how things were gonna go” – expectations and lineages and Ivy League educations,” he says. “Angus doesn’t and I certainly didn’t in school, so that resonated with me.” Still, he resisted over-relating to Angus, or trying to feel as if he were him. “It’s very easy, I think, for me initially to create a lot of parallels with my own story, with my own father,” he says. “But for me to try to input any of my personal experiences felt disingenuous in a lot of ways. So I made sure to really get away from that.”
It helped that the general recommendation that won on set was: don’t think about it too much. Just stay natural, protect the instincts Payne and casting director Susan Shopmaker saw in that first audition. “Once she figured out what we were for, she temporarily left her theatrical exoskeleton and became a fully trained and very talented film actor. “
Sessa has nothing but praise for Payne, who trusted him; Randolph, who taught by example to ask questions of her character on set and to take the heavy moments seriously but not too seriously; and Giamatti, “the most grounded, down-to-earth person I possibly could’ve ran into in this industry”.
“Dominic temporarily proved that he has natural talent,” Payne says. Paul [Giamatti] reports that his main contribution is to constantly remind Dominic how smart he is. Keeping him confident is key.
“Everyone was just telling me, ‘Stop playing,'” he recalled. Even in my life, I’m told, ‘Don’t become a celebrity, stay who you are. ‘”Sessa, preferably because of this advice and unlike much of his generation, is not a social media enthusiast. It’s not on TikTok; her Instagram is unverified, and at the time of writing, she has 3 posts and less than 9,000 followers. “I never think of it as something I wish or wish to do,” he says. “The parts I want to worry about are the paintings: making films like this, that make other people feel something. And if I do draw attention to myself, I wish it was because of the paintings I’m doing and not for some other reason.
“Fortunately, the other people I work with – the managers, the agents, all those other people, Paul, Da’Vine, Alexander – none of them pushed me to do any of that,” he says, although he imagines that if he looked for followers, they would probably help him with that too. “From the beginning, we hit him on the head and warned him not to smoke the Hollywood crack pipe,” Payne says. “So far, Dominic has given every single indication. That he’s got his head up and possibly he won’t screw it up, or he’ll let him screw it up. “
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Perhaps because, according to Sessa, the team of Holdovers “wasn’t super Hollywood,” the arrival in the industry was slow. He was the first to arrive in L. A. for the press, when everyone was in business, but not that much. others. ” Nothing has really changed,” he says. I just went to school [to examine theater at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh]. In my freshman year of school, I didn’t really tell anyone anything about the movie, so it was just general. I just have to be general, and that’s still general now.
Sessa is consciously and endearingly naïve about Hollywood: aware of the discourse about the Nepo children, for example, but not of the Nepo children themselves. “I don’t even know who the others are, who’s whose child, all that,” he says, emphasizing that he’s not a fan of pop culture. “I appreciate my ignorance. I don’t have an opinion about anyone. I log in and they’re all new users to me. It’s helping me. , because I can be myself and maybe not be hit as hard as I do in certain situations.
To be clear, a few things have changed: He’s gained messages from former coaches and teachers who have noticed him on the screen. She now has a Wikipedia page, an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her groundbreaking performance, and has landed a coveted spot in Variety magazine. List of 10 actors to watch. And now he’s acutely aware of two things: that starting a top-notch school career on an Alexander Payne set is a rare experience, one that can’t be replicated, and that the long term is wide open.
He is not sure what’s next: maybe a return to drama school, or a different theatre, or another film, if there’s a good opportunity. “Whatever it is, I definitely want to try to do something different,” he says. “The one takeaway from this whole experience is that I just want to be a part of movies in any way possible.” Maybe acting, maybe writing, maybe something else? “We’ll see. But right now, trying to be present.” You know: don’t overthink it.
The Holdovers hits theaters on January 19.