In the middle of filming The Holdovers, Dominic Sessa feared he was actually starring in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
It was spring 2022, right around the time high schools usually release their students for break, but Sessa wasn’t going on vacation with his family. Instead, the young actor spent his senior-year spring break still roaming the halls of his high school. Bummer. There was, however, one major perk: He was kicking it with Paul Giamatti, his new best friend and co-star of The Holdovers.
The eerie, Truman Show-style aspect of this situation is that the production, led by director Alexander Payne, happened to be shooting at Sessa’s own high school: Deerfield Academy, a boarding prep school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. His character, the spirited Angus, also happens to be heading into the second semester of his senior year.
Over Zoom, Sessa is wide-eyed as he recalls this freaky moment: “Oh my gosh,” Sessa remembers thinking. “I’m making a movie about my life right now. It’s crazy!”
The school in The Holdovers, a fictional Northeastern prep school called Barton Academy, is also on pause. But instead of breezy springtime, the 1970s-set drama takes place during a bleak winter. Angus’ family abandons him at school for the holidays, where he’s forced to hold over (get it?) in the dorms until the next semester begins. Instead of unwrapping presents and enjoying hot cocoa by the fire, Angus endures one of the worst Christmases of his life with teacher Paul Hunham (Giamatti), a smelly grump whose best friend is the dictionary.
Much like Angus did following his eventful holiday break, Sessa immediately returned to classes after he finished filming his very first Hollywood role. “Going back to school to graduate, it really grounded me,” says Sessa, who is now a college sophomore studying acting at Carnegie Mellon. “I was able to really appreciate [portraying Angus], to see how impactful this boarding school this experience was for him and these relationships with these teachers.”
After seeing The Holdovers and learning about Sessa’s life, you have to admit—it’s a little frightening how much these two stories align. It’s almost as if someone planned such a coincidence. In fact, someone did: In an effort to make the story feel as realistic as possible, Payne and his team scouted at a handful of Northeast prep schools to find the perfect Angus.
Sessa, who acted in high school plays, went through a few rounds of auditions thinking he might be cast in a background role. The stakes felt low. He wasn’t nervous. “I was able to [hide behind] my ignorance,” Sessa says. “It was the first time I’d ever auditioned for a movie—for any professional work. I didn’t really know how any of it worked. Even getting a callback, I didn’t understand how big of a deal that was. I was relaxed a little bit more than I should have been.”
But things became much more stressful once Sessa had landed the role. The original script for The Holdovers, penned by David Hemingson, had Angus as a freshman or sophomore, and Sessa was nervous about acting younger than he was. “In my mind, I was like, ‘I can’t be a 15-year-old,’” Sessa says. “‘People say I look older than I am right now. I don’t know how I could possibly play younger.’”
But Payne was welcome to notes, and eventually, the role morphed into the 12th-grader Angus we see in the film. “That allowed me to trust myself more,” Sessa says. “Once we got to that point, I was really able to see myself living in it.”
Besides the fact that the film takes place before he was born, The Holdovers parallels Sessa’s life almost completely. Even performing in a period piece didn’t frighten Sessa—in fact, it felt familiar.
“All of these [prep] schools, they’re all stuck in that time period, very traditional,” Sessa says. “They’re the same as they were back then.” So pluck any scene out of The Holdovers, place it another year, and it’ll still make sense.
Sessa wasn’t the only prep school alum on set. Giamatti, funnily enough, is also a graduate of a boarding school: Choate Rosemary Hall, in Wallingford, CT. In the movie, Mr. Hunham is a perturbed alum of Barton—he gripes about the elite status of the school, but at the same, Barton is his livelihood. Students like Angus are left to wonder: If this guy used to be one of us, why isn’t he more understanding?
Imaginably, it might be daunting sharing the screen with an Academy Award nominee in your first Hollywood movie, especially in a role like this one. But Sessa had nothing to fear: Although Giamatti shares Hunham’s educational background, Sessa says that the actor, thank goodness, is nothing like his mean-spirited character.
Sessa’s first time meeting his co-star in person was over a dinner of dumplings made by Giamatti. “We talked about AI and all that crap—he can really go deep into that stuff,” Sessa says of his co-star. “We would watch Futurama and Rick and Morty. It was really cool to be like, ‘Okay, I can hang out with this dude for real.’”
Although Giamatti and Sessa are the film’s leads, there’s one more powerhouse at play in The Holdovers. When the film isn’t a one-two punch of Angus’ youthful naivety and Hunham’s bitter wit, it’s a three-hander that also features Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb, Barton’s head cook. Sessa says that, behind the scenes, Randolph was a comforting presence—who even took time out of her day to coach him through his college applications. “You don’t think about it,” Sessa adds, “but it makes it so much easier when you have to act with this person and read lines with them, to be natural and be comfortable and put forth everything.”
But there was one particular aspect of filming that really helped Sessa fully become Angus: Paul’s damn lazy eye. “It definitely messes you up,” Sessa chuckles when recalling the character’s strange gaze in the film, looking in opposite directions—unlike Giamatti’s normal eyes. “It helped to get into the character more, because when his eye is doing that, it changes his whole face, his whole aura about him. You really see him for the character—he loses all of his Paul Giamatti.”
Is the eye real? Is it glass? Was it CGI? “I have the same questions,” Sessa says. “It was a great frustration of mine! I was not made privy to any of that information. I don’t know if it was pure acting, I don’t know if they had an eye contortionist, I don’t know what they did. I would see him on set, and his eye would be messed up, and then I’d see him when we wrapped and his eye would be… not messed up?”
Giamatti, ever the jokester, offered no explanations to Sessa: “If I asked him, he would just say, ‘It’s acting.’ I guess I’ll just take his word for it.”
While Giamatti leaves the cornea conundrum unclear, in their final moments together in the film, Hunham reveals to Angus which eye looks the wrong way. After arguing in gymnasiums, flirting with respective crushes at holiday parties, and enjoying contraband cherries jubilee (which minors are prohibited to eat at restaurants, thanks to a dash of liquor) together in a parking lot, Hunham and Angus bid each other a moving farewell near the end of Angus’ time at Barton.
“You have all these internal feelings that you’re expressing to the other character, but you’re not necessarily saying those things with your words,” Sessa says, of filming the touching sequence. “The words themselves in the script are very conversational, almost nonchalant, in a way. It’s those feelings underneath that really give those words a lot of weight.”
But these challenges make acting more worthwhile, the actor learned. “You love those moments,” he says. “When you can really get into them and capitalize on them, it’s incredible.”
Moving forward in his career, Sessa says that while he loves character-driven dramas like this one, he’d love to take on roles that “are further away from my own life and push me more as an actor.” But for now, Sessa is as pleased as Christmas punch while living in this full circle moment. The bonds he shared with a lot of his teachers at Deerfield, especially those who taught him acting, remind him of the relationship between Angus and Professor Hunham—although none of his instructors took him on a whirlwind trip to Boston like Paul.
“I think about all of the directors I had—these people were the ones who told me I could do it,” Sessa says. “Deciding to be an actor is something that’s a really scary decision. You have to have a level of confidence to feel like you really can do it, really put yourself out there. If I didn’t have those people to support me in that way, I definitely wouldn’t have done anything like this.”
