Doing magic tricks is cool again.
Dominic Sessa has a card trick he wants to show you.
written by DOUGLAS GREENWOOD
photography TINA TYRELL
styling THOM BETTRIDGE
Last July, in 100-degree Georgia heat, he was playing a moody college student all day for the upcoming cheeky holiday film Oh. What. Fun., surrounded by tinsel, the scent of baked cookies, and his on-screen mom Michelle Pfeiffer. At night, after a full day’s work of spreading holiday cheer, he’d go back to his rental apartment, and find playing cards strewn across the floor and down the side of his sofa. “I was practicing magic,” he says with a grin.
Just as Sessa was practicing his sleight of hand, the brains behind Now You See Me—the $700 million-grossing movie franchise—were figuring out their own new trick. After two movies with bonafide legends at the helm, among them Jesse Eisenberg and Morgan Freeman, their third, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, would be led by a new crop of stars. That wound up being Sessa, I Saw the TV Glow’s Justice Smith, and Ariana Greenblatt of Barbie fame.
In the movie, in theaters November 14, Sessa plays Bosco Leroy, the hands-on, slightly nerdy, and gung-ho successor to Jesse Eisenberg’s character from the two previous installments. The new film globe-trots from the States to Europe to Abu Dhabi with the same furious camp of its successors. (Rosamund Pike plays a diamond-clutching villain with a mean South African accent.) A world-tour heist movie is not only loaded with surprises and special effects, it’s loaded with the potential for its stars to have fun. “When you’re doing smaller, lower budget things, you don’t have as much time. It feels like you have all the time in the world with a movie like this,” Sessa tells me. He delightfully recounts how he got to try out his tricks on-camera repeatedly—sometimes 30 times in a row.
Sessa—old-school charming and movie-star handsome—talks about the experience of big-budget film making as if it was in his life plan all along. But he was once just a regular high school student.
When he was discovered, back in 2021, he was just 18 years old—a boarding student attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts on financial aid. The Oscar-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne was scoping out locations for his next project about an uptight history teacher who’s tasked with looking after the one boarding student left behind over Christmas. A two-birds-one-stone situation arose: While Payne searched for the right school, the film’s casting director simultaneously scouted the student bodies to see if any stood out to play the film’s second lead, a mouthy and complicated boarder. After five or six auditions, Sessa landed the part of Angus Tully. Payne has called Sessa “a pro from the get go.”
His performance earned rave reviews and a BAFTA nomination, and he spent months on the awards trail with Payne and his co-stars Paul Giamatti and Da’vine Joy Randolph, who went on to win the Best Supporting Actress prize at the Oscar’s. With each red carpet appearance, the Sessa hive gained a new soldier. One comment from his exuberant take on the E! Glambot at the 2024 Oscar’s: “dominic sessa you have to stop. your swag too silly. your joy too whimsical.” The video has 2.1 million views.
Next steps after a success like that are a tricky thing to navigate, but Sessa’s got good taste and is in perpetually great company. Despite making just five films in three years, he’s appeared on screen with co-stars who have garnered a collective 26 Oscar nominations between them—and have won five.
When Jesse Eisenberg first met Sessa, “he reminded me of myself,” Eisenberg says. Right after Eisenberg’s break-out role in 2002’s indie Roger Dodger, he had his own blockbuster turn in 2005’s Wes Craven movie Cursed. “I remember with Cursed thinking, ‘I’m going to try to play this as realistically as possible, even though the circumstances are so heightened’,” Eisenberg says. “Dom was doing a similar thing [in Now You See Me] in a wonderful way.”
The majority of Now You See Me was shot in Budapest, pushing Sessa headfirst into the kind of movie-making experience that could send a relative newcomer spinning. But he found fun in the difference. The film is an old-school action caper and allows Sessa to operate on a much wilder plane, diving headfirst into his magic training and combat training. “Jesse fractured his finger in one of the scenes we were doing,” Sessa tells me. “I didn’t break anything or fracture anything, thankfully, but I had a couple bruises.” There’s also an energetic sequence that involves an F1 car. “I can drive,” Sessa clarifies, “but I think driving an F1 car is way different than driving my Kia Forte!”
A fourth film in the franchise has been announced, but Sessa claims to know nothing about whether he’ll play a part in it. “I had the most fun making this movie, so I hope, if it happens, that we get to go somewhere cool, like Hawai’i or something,” he says. Oh—and one other thing he’s hoping for: “We met David Blaine a few nights ago and he was eating glass. I told a producer that I want to eat glass in the next one.”
In Budapest, between filming, he was hanging out at ruin bars and escape rooms with Smith and Greenblatt, exploring the city. But he’s still a guy in his early 20s, conscious of what others his age, the ones who aren’t professional actors, are normally doing. “One weekend, all of my high school friends—they’re in their junior year of college studying abroad—came to Budapest.” During the week, he was hanging out with Eisenberg and Freeman, creating magic in front of the camera. When the weekend came and he was just a kid again. “I had eight people staying in my apartment,” he says, laughing.
Sessa moved into an apartment of his own in New York earlier this year. He’s started filling it with things he’s found in thrift stores, like a painted picture of a beetle that hangs on the wall. “It was, like, 20 bucks,” he says, when I point it out, hanging over his head on our video call. “I’ve got a lot of random art around here.”
This is the first time he has lived alone. He’d spent his childhood living at home in New Jersey, before moving to Massachusetts in the 10th grade to board at Deerfield Academy. After shooting The Holdovers, he studied at Pennsylvania’s Carnegie Mellon University, refusing to reveal to his fellow drama majors that he’d already co-led a major motion picture. He returned to New Jersey after the film’s release, studying again at Carnegie Mellon during the SAG-AFTRA strike.
“He doesn’t have a taste for BS,” Havana Rose Liu, his Oh. What. Fun. co-star tells me. “He may be 23, but he’s got an old soul, seasoned quality to him that brings something special. It’s a kind of comfortability, respect and grace that makes it feel like he’s been at this for ages.”
Sessa is also stubborn by his own admission, but he’s also learning as each new thing happens to him. He settled on New York over Los Angeles for “basically every reason,” he insists. “I know way more people here, I like the seasons changing, I don’t like driving in traffic.” In his downtime, after he wrapped his forthcoming project and before he started his Now You See Me press, he found himself wandering the streets, playing golf—even joining a darts tournament.
That’s not surprising to Eisenberg: “I do two things well, and I do them every day. Dom signs up for a million things and then wins each one of them.”
Sessa drifts for a second and contemplates a different life: “It would be really cool to have a side hustle. Like if I got really good at pool, or darts, or poker, or something. What if I was more successful playing pool than acting, and that’s just what I committed to?” We ponder the possibility of Sessa producing a darts sports biopic. “Niche,” we agree, then Sessa adds: “We’d need a good editor to make that interesting.”
By his own admission, as a kid, “I wasn’t really a big movie person, and I didn’t really watch TV.” His parents encouraged him to be outside, and he hoped to play hockey professionally until he broke his femur. “I didn’t really have a strong relationship with movies, other than just the stuff that my dad would show me.” So his earliest memories of the screen are from sauntering into his living room and watching things like Jackass, Dexter, and The Godfather. He was too young for all of them, but they stuck with him all the same.
In 2017, when Sessa was 14, his father died. Sometimes, the things we hold onto in grief are the objects of the life we’ve lost. He still credits Jackass as his comfort watch. “And my dad was a big golfer,” he says. “Growing up, I hated golfing. Now it’s what I do for fun.”
“So many big, impactful things happened to me at a young age that I’m just now starting to think about, and have the willingness and strength to open them up and look at them,” he says. His time at Carnegie Mellon gave him the opportunity to look at his childhood in a deeper detail, through the lens of his art. He and his classmates were tasked with writing 10-minute plays, and he wants to write something longer, and maybe something more autobiographical, one day. He’s already written something based on the life of his sister, a childhood ballet dancer who’s since become a chef. “I’ve found that writing about these things that happened to me, or telling stories around that sort of thing has been a good way to get into it.”
Next year, after a few ensemble projects, Sessa will carry a film almost entirely on his own shoulders—and it comes with the kind of anticipation that would crush someone less cool about things than he is. It’s the new A24 film about the life of the legendary chef and writer Anthony Bourdain, titled Tony. Sessa will play Bourdain. Rather than telling his story in the traditional birth-to-death format, Tony is set during the summer of 1975 in Massachusetts, when he was a teenage busboy trying to become something. “It’s a story about a young man who’s fucking up and figuring it out,” Sessa says. “That was incredibly relatable to me, and the main reason I wanted to do it.”
We hear stories of young actors preparing for these kinds of parts: Timothée Chalamet’s eerie emulation of Bob Dylan’s singing voice for A Complete Unknown; Paul Mescal’s attempts to play guitar left-handed like Paul McCartney for The Beatles films. Sessa was freed of that for Tony. “I wasn’t bound to any sort of portrayal of him,” Sessa says because he was playing Bourdain pre-fame. “I tried to forget about the weight of how many people consider this person to be so respected and iconic.” He lets out a little chuckle, weighing up the comparisons to Chalamet and Mescal’s endeavors: “I cook a few things, sure, but I’m, like, a dishwasher for a lot of the movie!”
I’d read in an old interview that Sessa aspired to live away from everything, on a farm or in the countryside, engulfed by peace and quiet. This was in the midst of The Holdovers, when his life went from being a college student to earning a BAFTA nomination in a matter of moments. You can understand that craving when you see it from his perspective. Now, here he was, part of a different machine, living on top of other people in a densely populated city. Was that countryside dream still on his mind?
“I’m gonna map this out right now for the first time,” he says, looking to the ceiling, envisioning his path. “I’m gonna enjoy this city for now, and maybe when I’m like 28 or 29 I’ll start looking elsewhere. Somewhere like upstate New York, maybe Connecticut. Somewhere that I can get a lot of snow in the winter. 10 years after that, I’ll get married, and I’ll have a dog, like a Great Dane or a Doberman or something.”
Not blockbusters, or being known, or having so much money you can’t think straight. “Quiet place. Big ass house. Big ass yard. Big ass dogs. Love of your life.” He nods, locking it in. “That’s the end game.”