ACTING WAS NEVER really the plan for Dominic Sessa. “I kind of off-handedly stumbled into acting,” the 21-year-old admits. “I was a big ice hockey player growing up. That was the big dream of mine at the time.” In 2016, a few weeks before his first hockey season at high school, however, an accident sent him in a different direction. “Before we even played our first game, I broke my femur while skateboarding. So I wasn’t able to play hockey.” Needing to fill an extracurricular slot in his studies, he joined that year’s musical at his boarding school, the historic Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. The acting bug quickly bit him.
Fast forward to 2021, when Oscar-winning writer-director Alexander Payne was busy casting The Holdovers, his 1970s-set comedy-drama set in a boarding school. Over 800 actors were considered for the role of Angus Tully, the troubled young student forced to stay at his school over Christmas. Casting potentials came from all over the world. Then they decided to look at where they were actually filming: Deerfield.
“I got a call from my director in our theatre programme,” says Sessa —by this point a star of the drama department — “saying that these casting people were looking for kids to sit in the classroom scenes. I went in and read some lines, thinking that if things went well, I could be in the background.”