2023 was a transformative year for Dominic Sessa. Sure, he filmed his first big break, Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers,” almost two years ago while still in High School, but over the past four months he’s seen that movie become a critical and audience darling all while attending Carnegie Mellon University as an everyday theater major. Oh, and throw in a December where he landed numerous critics’ groups honors and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Breakthrough Performance.
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“The Holdovers” finds Sessa playing Angus, a cocky boarding school student stuck on campus over the Christmas holiday after his parents abandon him for a carribean holiday. His only companionship turns out to be his cranky instructor Mr. Hunham (Paul Giamatti) and the the head cook, Ms. Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Over a week or so he not only bonds with the pair, but reveals the secret he’s also attempted to keep hidden.
Speaking with The Playlist last month, Sessa wasn’t sure whether he was going to continue with his degree or jump into the business full-time, but it was obvious he was still adjusting to the spotlight.
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The Playlist: Dominic, are you enjoying your first round of movie press tour so far?
Dominic Sessa: Yes. I’m taking it all in, and enjoying it. It’s definitely different than anything I’ve ever done before, but it’s a new experience and I’m learning.
O.K. What’s the one question you have been asked the most that you still can’t believe you’re being asked?
Well, everybody has been pretty interested in how I got into this movie, but it’s not that I can’t believe they’ve been asking it because I do think it’s a cool story, so people are interested in that.
I won’t go down that road then since you’ve been asked so many times, but I think you were in college when you got this role. Did you decide to drop out and be like, “O.K., I’m just going to do auditions and run with this full time”? How did this change your life, I guess?
Well, I was a senior in high school and I [got the part] and took two months off of school. My high school was really cool about it. They kind of passed me for the winter term and I was able to go back in the spring and graduate. Then, after the summer, which this past year I was at Carnegie Mellon for a year in the drama school studying acting, and then, yeah, I was in school still at Carnegie Mellon, a sophomore this fall. The strike was going on, so I was just not doing any of the promotion and press stuff. I was in school just kept studying, but now I’m taking a leave of absence because I’m out here doing this stuff and it just doesn’t really work with a school schedule. But yeah.
Has the movie gotten you an agent yet? Do we need to screen to the world that you need representation?
No, luckily I was able to find some cool people along the way after we finished filming this, but yeah, I’m good for now.
Good for now. Is it true that you hadn’t seen the movie before the strike and you paid to see it in a theater?
Yeah, well, like I said, I was at Carnegie Mellon for school, and before I came out here to do these interviews and things, I was just clearing out my apartment, and me and my friends went to see it at this movie theater called The Manor in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh. Yeah, it’s like a little kind of art-house theater. Yeah, it’s definitely something I wanted to do for a long time. All I wanted to do was go into a movie theater and buy a ticket for my own movie so I did that, which was really cool.
You shot it almost two years ago. Correct?
Yeah, about a year and a half, yeah, coming up on two years.
Having not seen it in so long and having worked on your acting so much in that respect, what surprised you the most when you saw it?
Just the way it sounded, honestly. The audio was really surprising to me because Alexander is obviously a big film history buff, so he has this big lexicon of knowledge in terms of particularly seventies films. I’ve never really been a big movie person and the movies I watched are all just new stuff, this really clear audio, those things. It’s really interesting to hear my voice in this sort of edited version where it seems like an old movie. I was kind of looking at myself like I time-traveled in a way. That was really cool.
The movie is so cool in that respect. I keep telling people it has more of a ’70s aesthetic than actual ’70s movies and in the best way possible. When you were making it, did it feel like a period piece?
I mean, for me, yeah, I think so. But for Alexander and Paul, those guys, they were alive, Da’Vine wasn’t alive, but yeah, we were like the babies, I guess. But yeah, I remember Paul saying, “I can’t believe I was alive and this is called a period piece. Period should mean horse and carriages and stuff like that.” But yeah, it was cool. Yeah, walking into these sets in New England that were, I mean, a lot of them virtually untouched, just kind of stuck in time in ways. But yeah, smoking in restaurants, all that stuff really helped you get into that time. Just the way the set was run felt very, from what I’ve learned from these guys, was very reminiscent of what it was like to film in the 70s, just a very intimate setting.
What about playing Angus appealed to you most?
I just think I found it really interesting that in a lot of movies, it’s hard to deploy this really acute sense of emotional intelligence into these younger characters. That was really what I was impressed with when reading it was just how capable this kid was of understanding not only his own emotions and feelings and concerns about the world but also seeing that in the other characters, Paul and Mary. That was really something I was excited about, to be in high school and be dealing with these, I don’t know, sort of existential crisis type things, which is that’s the fun stuff you want those layered people.
This was your first professional film gig, but I’ve read you’d done a significant amount of theater before this. Were you nervous working with Paul and Devon or Da’Vine I should say?
Yeah, I didn’t know what they were going to be like at all. These were celebrities to me. I’d never been around famous people. I didn’t know what they were like, or how they were, but in the first five minutes of meeting them, they were so cool and down to earth and just normal. It was just so comforting to meet all these people and just know that it was going to be two months of support and care for one another, and there just wasn’t going to be stress really and we were just going to be able to just take the ride and get rid of any bumps along the way.
In terms of acting on screen, was there anything that was a difficult adjustment or surprised you about the film process?
Yeah, you don’t really rehearse. When you’re doing theater, you’re doing a play or a musical, you have a pretty extensive, I mean except for Broadway, maybe they get like 10 days, but still you get time to rehearse a show, meet your cast and work with them and talk about it and marinate on your notes. But on a film set, you go in and you have an idea of maybe what it will look like. You block it and run it a couple of times, and that’s basically what you go for. If you get a note, if Alexander tells you something that he’s thinking and you have to do your best to execute that pretty much immediately because time is money and they can’t keep filming all day. You do get multiple takes, but at a certain point you have to move on and you can’t go back. That was something that was kind of hard to grapple with. You just have to be prepared to put it all out there every day.
Was there at least do a sit-down table read before the movie started?
We did do one big read-through beforehand over Zoom because this was still COVID and stuff, so everybody was in different places. But yeah, I mean that was really all we did. A couple of times it was Da’Vine, Paul and I, and Alexander as well just reading through stuff. That was the time when if there were any adjustments that either the actors felt could be made to the script or Alexander or David picked up on something through the read-through, that’s where the adjustments would’ve been made beforehand. Then once we started filming, everything was kept tight to the script pretty much.
Oh, so not a lot of improv at all?
No, not really. Not a lot was cut either. [It’s] pretty much the script that I read and saw the first time I got it was everything in the movie. I don’t think there were any big scenes cut or anything. Yeah, that was the entire screenplay, pretty much.
You’re making your first movie. Was there a moment, a scene where you remember going, “Oh, O.K., I got this. I’m not going to get fired tomorrow”? Do you remember having that moment?
Yeah, I think there was one day when we were doing that whole chase scene with Paul and me through the halls. Paul has a line when he’s making us run laps outside, “Without exercise, the body devours itself.” And there was a choice that I made running through the halls where I kind of turned back and said that line and mocked him. It wasn’t set up to film that at all, but when I said that, Alexander moved the camera and was like, “That’s great. We got to get that and put that in.” And that was the first time I realized I had an influence on this set and my input was welcome and my creative process could be free and open with these people. That was a really cool moment, I think.
Was there one scene that you were most concerned about shooting that you were like, “O.K., I have to nail this this day.”?
Yeah, one that comes to mind is when I go to the ward, the psychiatric hospital to see my father because I’d met the actor who plays my dad over Zoom a couple months before we shot that and met him briefly. But you have this idea of who the person is going to be, what that relationship was in the past and what is happening now, and nothing is really explicitly stated necessarily about what really was going on and what it was like. You create that and then you get that to set that day, and then you finally meet the actor and you then are troubleshooting everything that you kind of created in your mind then with what’s right in front of you now and what this person is bringing. And that’s a challenging thing. But thankfully, he was incredible and great. I was maybe stressing too much about it and it was kind of a relief when we finally got started. But yeah, that’s a challenging thing when you create something in your mind and then it’s different when you’re there.
I talked to David Hemingson, the movie’s screenwriter and he said that in his mind, he knows where all the characters went after the movie, what happened to them, whatever. Do you have any thoughts about what you think happened to Angus?
I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about the movie is it’s kind of unclear for all of them what comes next. Obviously, Mary’s sister is having this baby and there’s hope for the future there and that representation of possibility and all that. But when it comes down to it, Paul is going off to Syracuse and maybe Carthage, that’s the plan, but it’s unclear if that’s ever actually going to happen. Then for Angus, he’s got these really important lessons from Paul and we see it’s had an impact on him, but it was really only a couple of weeks that they spent together. Is this really going to last for him? Is this really going to hold for him and keep him in line? It becomes unclear, but I think as an audience member, that’s a nice thing to leave with, that you hope for them to do well and you’re just hoping that something good is going to happen for them without knowing.
I will tell you this because I’m sure people don’t want to jinx it and don’t want to tell you, but you are in a movie that’s going to get nominated for best picture, and to say it’s a great way to start off your career is an understatement. Will your parents kill you if you don’t finish your degree, or are you allowed to move to New York and LA and keep your career going?
My parents have no understanding of … I mean, I have very little understanding of this world, so they know even less. For them, they’re just excited to see all this happening and just really trusting me and trusting that I make the right decisions. If that involves school, they’re fully supportive of that. If that involves me doing whatever, moving to New York and just auditioning and trying to make it, I’m sure they would be supportive of that too. Yeah, they love me.
“The Holdovers” is available for digital download.