Angus Tully’s first line in The Holdovers tells us everything we need to know about him.

Ridiculed by Doug Crandall, who snatches Tully’s swimwear from his suitcase, jesting that it looks like “women’s underwear”, Tully quickly retorts, “It’s the same swimsuit James Bond wears in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Can’t get more masculine than that.” 

This simple, seemingly insignificant sentence steeped in subtext tells us that Angus is still a boy searching for who he is, looking to movie stars and magazines to uncover how he ought to navigate life without a present father figure. He’s boyish and awkward, not quite sure of who he is, irritable and exhausted, carrying the weight of the world in his mind and disguising it all through quips that keep the other boys from peeling off his carefully curated mask.

Dominic Sessa is a first-time actor.

Passing on a role that carries all this, for the most part, silently opposite Paul Giamatti’s Paul Hunham to someone who has never stepped foot on a movie set before feels like a recipe for disaster, making Sessa’s sensitive and intellectual debut all the more miraculous. 

Angus Tully (in the wrong hands) could become a grating caricature of a privileged prep school kid. 

His opening scene is saturated with reasons to dislike him as he speaks in witticisms about sleeping with a fellow student’s mother and calling the same kid a “Christmas orphan”. But it’s everything that should make our eyes roll that envelopes us further into his endearing charm. He navigates the humour like a veteran, knowing that the comedy is in how serious the actor takes it, which lends itself to his more theatrical scenes. 

One of these masterfully delivered moments sees Angus Tully sprawled across the back of Hunham’s car in a heated, heightened debate, which has Sessa screaming through tears, “Of course you meant it metaphorically. What were you going to do, actually go and wash your hands?!” 

Not only is Sessa mastering the character and the comedy, but the technicality of the lyrical language David Hemingson so artfully crafts throughout his screenplay. Giamatti, Randolph and Sessa are ping-ponging dialogue throughout the 133-minute runtime, and Sessa doesn’t fall out of beat for a second. 

He’s holding his own artfully across from Giamatti, whose character of Paul Hunham is going through his own inner turmoil. Sessa is already, in one performance, an intelligent actor who understands when his role in a scene is to support, bringing out beautifully vulnerable moments from Giamatti that can only be produced opposite a thoughtful scene partner.

Sessa also has scenes that are singularly his throughout The Holdovers. In a pivotal moment with his father, Sessa sits opposite an actor he has shared no prior frames with and leans fully into the vulnerability of a boy pining for his father’s approval. His eyes are mounted with hope, believing that maybe this will be the time he gets through to him, but it all comes crashing down around him, and that small boy inside him arises once more. 

Actors spend a lifetime chasing what Sessa delivers in one movie. It’s a dream of a first role but requires raw talent to deliver it as effortlessly as Sessa does. Any Best Supporting Actor lineup missing him feels like an insult and rejection of the true meaning of the category – to support the lead’s journey. 

Giamatti couldn’t deliver a Golden Globe-winning performance without the pitch-perfect punctuation of Sessa’s Angus Tully, who has audiences buzzing about what could possibly come next from this brilliant young actor. 

The Holdovers is currently streaming on Peacock.
You can find our review of The Holdovers here.
You can also find out interview with Sessa here.