It pays to go to high school theater cast parties.
Dominic Sessa did and discovered director Alexander Payne was looking for actors to play students at an all-boys prep school, circa 1970.
“My theater teacher said, ‘These casting people are going to come and maybe look for some background people,’” Sessa says. “I just thought, ‘Maybe if it goes well, I can sit at a desk or something.’”
Instead, he got one of the leading roles in “The Holdovers” – a young man who’s left back at school over the holidays.
The part gave him something his now-Carnegie Mellon University classmates don’t have – talk that he could be nominated for an Academy Award for his performance.
“The movie was a little bit more challenging than what I’d done in the past,” Sessa admits. “You just don’t know what to expect.”
Dominic Sessa stars as Angus Tully in director Alexander Payne’s "The Holdovers."
Payne, however, was taken with Sessa’s natural quality—and ‘70s era hair. “The casting director had seen 800 submissions by the time we found Dominic,” he says. “When I was coming down to the final decision, (star Paul Giamatti) was generous enough to read with both of the (finalists) via Zoom. We agreed Dominic was the one.”
To give the young actor a sense of what he was going for with “The Holdovers,” Payne showed Sessa a number of films. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” for example, had the kind of dialogue speed he wanted in “Holdovers.” “The Graduate,” “The Landlord,” “Harold and Maude,” “The Last Detail” and “Paper Moon” were among other references. While prepping the film, he held his ‘70s film bootcamp for the film’s cinematographer, production designer, costume designer and Sessa.
“Without trying to imitate any single one of them, I just wanted to remind ourselves of the world we would’ve been splashing around in had we been working back then,” Payne says.
One of the settings – a restaurant called the Winning Ticket – made a particular impression. “I remember it just being full of smoke – plumes of smoke,” Sessa says. “It looked different but, generally speaking, it was fairly reminiscent of how I experienced school.”
Sessa, a 2022 graduate of the Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, had been in a production of Neil Simon’s “Rumors” when the casting call went out.
Because the film was shot at a nearby school, Sessa was familiar with the territory. “All of them, for the most part, are very much stuck in time,” he says. “They’re very traditional.”
Payne wanted the kind of feel that comes from shooting on location. That helped Sessa, Giamatti and co-star Da’Vine Joy Randolph feel like they were in a “Holdovers” world.
“It’s the best thing you can ask for,” says Randolph, who plays the school’s cook. “All that stuff helps fill out the character. You don’t have to work harder to imagine it.”
Giamatti found his school desk drawers filled with “period-appropriate” items.
“There was very little trickery,” Sessa says.
From left, Dominic Sessa stars as Angus Tully, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb and Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham in "The Holdovers."
A scene in which he dislocates his shoulder felt real because the prosthetic he wore was so good. “It was like that phantom limb sort of thing,” Sessa says.
Running around the school’s hallways brought plenty of joy. “I laughed the hardest when (Paul) started running.”
The experience taught Sessa plenty about the business. He thought celebrities went to their trailers when they weren’t on set. Instead, Giamatti and Randolph freely engaged and made him felt like he belonged.
“I genuinely could not have asked for better people to do this with,” he says.
Movie critic Bruce Miller says "The Holdovers" is a holiday movie with some rougher edges. Despite being bathed in the glow of nostalgia, “The Holdovers” is brutally real about human relationships.
