The Break
A hockey injury changed the plan. Dominic Sessa enrolled at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts on scholarship, expecting to play on the ice. He broke his femur before his first season. He joined the drama department instead, appearing in student productions of Antigone and Rumors.
In 2021, director Alexander Payne arrived at Deerfield to cast The Holdovers. Sessa auditioned, made the callbacks, and landed the lead role as Angus Tully, a sharp-tempered student stranded at school over the holidays. It was his first time on camera. He was 21, and he had no prior on-camera experience.
The film debuted in October 2023. The response was immediate. Sessa won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Young Performer and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. He received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He had not planned to be an actor. He enrolled at Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama, then took a leave of absence to continue working.
The Kitchen
Matt Johnson, the director of Blackberry, cast Sessa in the lead of his next film. Tony follows a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain across the summer of 1975, washing dishes at a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Sessa was announced in the role in August 2024. Bourdain's estate endorsed the project.
"It's a story about a young man who's f***ing up and figuring it out," Sessa said ahead of the film's release. The film does not cover Bourdain's death or his television career. It focuses on one summer, one character, one formation. Johnson and Sessa kept a deliberate remove from the Bourdain mythos. "I don't think we would have been able to make it if we were coming from a point of being huge fans of Bourdain," Sessa told Today.
Critics saw the film in late July 2026. Tony holds a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety's Owen Gleiberman described Sessa as "an eager, voluble, simmering bad boy who is playing out his inner turmoil." IndieWire credited Johnson for "trusting in the magic of Sessa's wholly self-possessed lead performance." The Hollywood Reporter said he "nail[s] the contradictory aspects of a slippery character." The theatrical run begins August 7.
What's Left to Know
Sessa was born on October 25, 2002. He is 23. In three years, he has gone from a student with no camera experience to the lead of two films that were reviewed like events. The question now is whether the craft scales to material that does not already carry narrative momentum. Nothing in his work so far suggests it won't.
