‘The Holdovers’ Breakout Dominic Sessa Graduated From Boarding School to … Boarding School
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When Dominic Sessa found out he had been cast in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, he was a high school senior at the prestigious boarding school Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and was in the middle of writing a paper about “Hamlet or something” for a teacher who rarely gave good grades and was “super hard to impress,” he says. It was a tiny bit of art imitating life, as Sessa had just discovered he would be playing a teen at a fictional institution not unlike Deerfield who develops a bond over one lonely Christmas with an irascible professor played by Paul Giamatti — who rarely hands out an A.
Sessa never ended up finishing the paper. “I remember just slamming my laptop shut,” he recalls. It seems unlikely that Giamatti’s Paul Hunham would ever give Sessa’s Angus Tully the benefit of the doubt, but in real life, Sessa got away with this academic lapse. Thankfully, he still was able to graduate. “It was a good-enough excuse,” he adds of getting the job.
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Sessa is now 21 and has completed a year of training at Carnegie Mellon. But when the young actor was cast as Angus, his highest-profile gigs were in Deerfield’s drama department. In fact, just before he got the opportunity to audition from casting director Susan Shopmaker, he had been performing in its production of Rumors by Neil Simon. On top of that, he had never acted for the camera before.
Still, by the time Sessa actually started work on The Holdovers, he felt well prepared. He had been studying the script for two months, and in addition to meeting and working with Payne, he had also gotten to know Giamatti a little.
Sessa thinks that at first Payne wasn’t convinced he could do the role, which was initially written for a younger actor. “I was sort of trying to play younger, and it was not natural — it just wasn’t real and he just wasn’t buying that,” says Sessa of his initial readings with the director. “It finally got to a point, maybe the fourth time I met with Alexander, that I was being myself more.”
Sessa quickly found he had a lot in common with Giamatti, who attended Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut, one of Deerfield’s rivals. Once Sessa had secured the role, Giamatti would invite him over to dinner so they would get to know each other offscreen — one of Payne’s goals. “He just did everything possible to make me feel comfortable,” Sessa says.
Even onscreen, the many scenes of eating were comfortable ones. When Angus, Paul and cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) were supposed to be dining, Payne would simply instruct the actors to enjoy their meals. “The way Alexander directs and creates the environment, he would say, ‘OK, just have dinner, just eat,’ and that’s what it would be,” Sessa remembers. “We kind of just had an opportunity to catch up on the day, almost.”
In a full-circle moment, the production brought Sessa back to Deerfield for filming during the school’s spring break. His dorm wasn’t as he’d left it, however. “Some of my friends on my hall sort of converted it while I was gone,” he says. “My room became a big bedroom, and then my other friend’s room became a kitchen and a gaming room.”
While The Holdovers offers a complicated portrait of boarding school as a place of privilege that can also be a safe haven, Sessa loved his own experience in that world. “Even as a young kid, I really wanted to be in an environment where everybody around me was motivated and ambitious,” he says.
But now school is on the back burner. He had to take a leave of absence from Carnegie Mellon as the promotional train for The Holdovers revved up following the SAG-AFTRA strike, and now it’s unclear whether he’ll go back. “I do have the option ultimately to go back if that ends up happening, but I don’t really know,” he says. “I can’t really think that far ahead right now.”
This story first appeared in the Jan. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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