When twenty-one-year-old actor Dominic Sessa was in middle school, he broke his femur right before hockey season started. This could have been devastating. In the Northeast, where Sessa attended the famed Massachusetts boarding school Deerfield Academy, hockey is “like Texas football,” he says over the phone. But the experience wound up changing his life for the better. “The only thing I could do was hysterical,” he recalls. “So I did that and I actually enjoyed it.”

Sessa did go back to hockey but by his senior year he was already planning to skip sports in favor of performing in the winter show until word went around that auditions would be held on campus for a role in an upcoming Alexander Payne film. The Holdovers, which was shot at Deerfield, explores the relationship between a lonely, angry student (Sessa) and his disgruntled sad sack teacher (Paul Giamatti) who find themselves stuck on campus together over the winter 1970 holiday break. Sessa auditioned, was cast, and while most of his friends were slogging it out on campus in the cold, dark of winter 2024, he was enjoying award season in Los Angeles, where The Holdovers was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture. We sat down with Sessa to hear about what he’s been up to since and asked him how it feels to settle into his career as a young actor after such a fairy tale entrance.

DOMINIC SESSA: Hi.

LIZZY GOODMAN: Hi, how are you? Thank you so much for making time to do this today. I know it’s a busy time and we really appreciate it.

DS: Yeah, of course.

LG: So where and what are you shooting right now?

DS: Right now I’m in Atlanta, and I’m about to finish a movie called Oh. What. Fun. It’s a comedy. Stars Michelle Pfeiffer. Michael Showalter is directing it.

LG: Oh, amazing.

DS: Yeah it’s been really great.

LG: Your story is amazing—kind of a dream scenario. You were a student actor one day and then auditioned for this role, got it, and then you find yourself on the set of an Alexander Payne film with actors Paul Giamatti and Da’vine Joy Randolph. And that’s before the film gets nominated for five Oscars. The upsides of a fast rise are obvious but is there a sense of whiplash? How are you doing with the zero to sixty of it all?

DS: I don’t think my life has changed that much. I mean, I still live with my mom and it’s not like I’ve bought anything cool.

LG: What? Not even one cool thing? Come on!

DS: I’m just really obsessed with the fact that I’m able to be acting all the time. I understood that a lot of people really liked The Holdovers and it’s really overwhelming, and flattering in so many ways but it was a question on my mind, like, how fast after that am I gonna be able to get back on set and be doing another movie? And then I was able to do another movie. And now I’m on set for another thing. Those worries went away, but then there’s also that pressure of coming out so hot with something that everybody loves so much, I want to continue to do a good job and be successful but I also am self-aware enough to like, not put too much pressure on myself, because I’m just starting out and I still don’t really totally know what I’m doing. I’m just having fun.

LG: You told me you’re still living at home for the moment, but do you want to live in New York eventually? Do you want to buy, you know, even one expensive thing? If you let yourself go down the fantasy path, where does it take you?

DS: Yeah, I want to find a place to live in the city for a little bit, and experience that. At a certain point I would really like to have a house out of the city. I would love to have a farm and grow my own food.

LG: Did you grow up with a connection to the land? Or is that something that you do independently feel drawn to?

DS: I grew up being outdoors a lot. I grew up in Ocean City, New Jersey, right on the beach. But the farm idea—I would like to maybe go back to school. I’m in Georgia right now and the University of Georgia they have one of the best agriculture programs in the country, so I’d love to go to a school like that one day to get a degree in farming and take five years off of acting to cultivate my farm.

LG: That’s amazing. Romantic and practical at the same time. So, this is a very strange transition, given that we’re talking about back-to-the-earth stuff but I do want to ask you—I heard that you wore a tuxedo shirt to your prom…

DS: That is a funny story. You could probably find a picture on, like, Deerfield’s prom archives, but I have a goatee and really funny glasses and mutton chops, of course, and my tuxedo t-shirt. I didn’t ask anyone to the prom because I didn’t really expect anyone to want to go with me like that but there was a girl that reached out and asked me to go with her. I was like, yeah, totally, we can go but just so you know, this is this is the plan. This is the idea. This is what I’m doing. And she shut it down immediately. It was the funniest thing ever.

LG: She’s like, just kidding. I’m disinviting you, that’s funny.

DS: Me and my friends thought it was so funny.

LG: You were like, I have to be me and wear my tuxedo shirt? Or did you go with her?

DS: No! I said that’s fine, I’m not changing for this, so I’ll go alone. I’m very stubborn.

LG: Hilarious. The last thing I was just going to ask you is you did this amazing shoot for us that’s really stylish and beautiful and I wanted to know, especially given that tuxedo T-shirt story, are you having fun with the dress up part? Is your sense of style changing and expanding?

DS: I think it’s cool. Like, I mean, it’s definitely not a part of this that I anticipated—getting to, you know, wear and take pictures, some of these brands and clothes and stuff. But I think it hasn’t really affected my style or way of dressing. Some of these brands are really generous, and they’ll give you some stuff that you can wear and just have, but I’ll still eat Doritos in like a $300 T-shirt. I still will walk in the mud in these cool sneakers or whatever that they give me. I still wear the clothes the same way.

LG: Given your life plans, maybe very expensive boots on your farm is the ultimate look for you.

DS: I’d love to do a line of farming clothing.

LG: Yeah, Carhartt Work in Progress is going to call you after we publish this and be like, hey, let’s do this.

This story appears in the pages of VMAN 53: now available for purchase!

Photography Blair Getz Mezibov

Fashion Gro Curtis

Grooming Fernando Torrent (L’Atelier)

Executive producer Anastasia Suchkov (Noted Collective)

Production manager Lauren Beck (Noted Collective)

Digital technician Jamie O’Brien

Lighting director Corey Danieli

Stylist assistant Liv Vitale

Production assistant Ohene Okera (Noted Collective)