Dominic Sessa (‘The Holdovers’) on his film debut: ‘I was so hyper-focused, so in the moment every day’

Dominic Sessa was a drama student at the private Deerfield Academy boarding school in Massachusetts who had just finished his fall play in 2021 when he found out that a casting director for a new film called “The Holdovers,” to be directed by Alexander Payne, was coming to his school to conduct auditions. “I jumped right on that and thought that’d be cool to be in the background,” he remembers, “maybe be at a desk in a classroom scene or something. But immediately, when I met the casting director Susan Shopmaker, she was really interested in something that I was bringing.” Mind you, Sessa had never so much as auditioned for an on-camera role before, much less co-starred in a feature. “I didn’t know how callbacks worked,” he admits, “so the fact they were asking me to audition again and again, I didn’t really fully appreciate how good a sign that was.” But a handful of callbacks later, the major role of Angus Tully was his. Watch out exclusive video interview above.

Playing the role of the brilliant but brooding and troubled Angus – who is left at the fictitious elite Barton Academy behind during the winter break of 1970 to hang out with a professor (Paul Giamatti) and the academy’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) – Sessa has received rave notices for his performance. This is pretty heady stuff for a young actor presently attending Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh (from which he is taking a leave of absence to promote “The Holdovers”). “I’m flattered to get a positive reception,” he stresses, “but I guess I had no idea how people were going to feel about this, especially me being this new person who has never done this before. I knew at least my mom was going to like it, and that was a positive. So if anybody else liked it, that was just icing on the cake.”

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And it’s true? His mom likes it?

“Yeah, I think so, I hope so,” Sessa sheepishly replies.

While Sessa likes to joke that what the casting director and Payne saw in him was that he “had the right hair,” he admits that with the stage having been his training ground, he tended in the audition process to go too big. “The thing I just needed to get to was being natural and comfortable and human,” he acknowledges. He adds, “I felt confident that I could get there and be good in this movie and be prepared for it. I just needed them to realize it, too.”

That confidence likely came through and convinced Payne and company to take a shot on a newcomer with zero experience at anything approaching this level. Initially, he admits it was “very surreal. But at the same time, I think I was so hyper-focused, and so in the moment every day, that I just kind of got into the groove of things and really be in the moment with the characters. Paul and Da’Vine were so good at making a new person like me feel comfortable in that setting…I didn’t know what these people were going to be like at all. They were celebrities, in my mind. I didn’t know how they were in real life. But within the first hour of meeting them both, their candor and care for me and my success in this process (was clear). They really welcomed me with open arms and were so willing to just offer every bit of advice that I could need.”

SEEOscar Experts Typing: Could ‘The Holdovers’ or ‘American Fiction’ take down the Best Picture top dogs?

It was equally comfortable and relaxed for Sessa to work with Payne, whom he observes “totally trusted me in my creative process and artistry in general.” He says that the director was “really good at simplifying things for me. He always would say, ‘The best film actors feel, but they don’t show.’ So it’s all about feeling those emotions internally, and then having those kind of fester behind that mask and letting the camera find all of that. And that was a big transition for me, in terms of theater to film…When you’re on a film set, everything is out of order and it’s by the minute. So every take, every second is worth something, so you really have to be on it. That was the biggest challenge, I think, just the immediacy of everything.”

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