By now you’ve heard the story.
Dominic Sessa, the breakout star of Alexander Payne’s celebrated comedy The Holdovers, makes his feature film debut in the role of Angus Tully, a sullen student attending the fictional New England boarding school Barton Academy. Left at the school as a “holdover” during Christmas break, Tully and a handful of other holdovers are watched over by Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a uniformly loathed classics professor. Along with Barton’s head cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Hunham and Tully eventually embark on a mini “field trip” to Boston.
The genuine, heartfelt moments of bonding featured in the film would challenge any actor, but Sessa handles the role beautifully and with tremendous grace. It ranks among the very best debut performances of all time. He’s honestly that great.
And he never dreamed the opportunity would even present itself.
“I wrapped up my fall play, ‘Rumors’ by Neil Simon. I remember my head of school telling me at our cast party that there were these movie people coming by to look at the school for a location. There were also some casting people looking for some background actors to be in the school and sit in classrooms,” Sessa explained. “When they came, I went into hopefully score a spot in the background and just to see a movie set, really. I walked in not knowing they were still up in the air about who is going to play this kid opposite Paul Giamatti. There was something they saw in me, I guess, in that first meeting.”
Sessa auditioned and met with Payne over a 2-month period. Each time he auditioned, he immediately thought, “Well, that was probably the last one.” A final reading with Payne and Giamatti finally led to the role. Not bad for a boarding school theater kid, a theater kid who received on-the-job training about eliminating his theater-honed impulses and embracing camera acting.
To truly embody Angus Tully, Sessa considered a backstory for the character. David Hemingson’s intricate screenplay included quite a bit of information about this kid, the product of a broken home, but Sessa wanted to take it a bit further. He wanted to understand what lived beneath the surface of each step he took within the narrative.
“The thing that really helped me create this kid was creating that backstory, that relationship that maybe existed when he was younger with his father,” Sessa revealed, “and imagining those times in stark contrast to presumably the experience of a lot of the other kids at school. That really helped me pinpoint his place in that environment.”
With the character firmly in his grasp, Sessa still needed to orient himself with the acting world of Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, two acclaimed performers far more seasoned than Sessa himself. Initially, he felt that pressure, that sense of living up to the moment.
Yet, that feeling quickly went away once he started sharing scenes with the two actors. He found their openness as performers greatly helped him overcome his lack of film experience.
“I realized quickly that the thing that makes them masters and makes them such pros is that I’m able to go into a scene having never done this before, and with their talent, their ability, they’re able to do things and bring things in their performance. That helped me rise to the occasion. The concern was how am I going to compete in a scene with Giamatti? But it’s almost easy when you’re actually in it because he’s so good. He’s giving you so much that it’s hard to go wrong when you’re with such incredible actors. So I was just happy that I was able to piggyback off of his wave, Da’Vine’s wave as well, and just take what they were giving me. They just trusted me. They didn’t tell me how to do things or tell me that I was wrong in any way. They really let me have my own process and put forth my own artistry.”
The Holdovers is in theaters nationwide and is also available on demand.
