Dominic Sessa’s New Role; Bob Geldof’s Wish

EXCLUSIVE: Dominic Sessa, the 21-year-old rising star, didn’t win a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA award Sunday night – that went to Oppenheimer’s Robert Downey Jr. – but he did pick up his first post-The Holdovers role that will see him starring with Rose Byrne in director Stephanie Laing’s drama Tow.

This news was confirmed by several sources over the BAFTA Awards weekend where your intrepid columnist attended more soirées than is healthy. The trick though is to go teetotal and guzzle down fruit juice: cranberry with a tear-drop of orange juice is the mocktail du jour!

My Deadline colleague, international editor Andreas Wiseman, revealed last week that Byrne is expected to star in the true-story Tow.

Bryne will portray Amanda Ogle, a homeless woman who slept in her 1991 Toyota Camry, who entered into a 369 day legal battle against a towing company that had impounded her car after it had been stolen. The tow firm had demanded $21,634 to return the automobile to her.

I spoke to Sessa on the red carpet, though at that point I wasn’t aware of his connection to Tow. It’s not yet clear what role Sessa will portray in the movie.

 The film’s original screenplay is written by Jonathan Keasey, Brant Boivin, and Annie Weismann.

It was a gift for Sessa to land his debut feature role in a movie directed by Alexander Payne and it came with a bow in the shape of Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph; both stunning.

The Holdovers entered the BAFTAs with seven nominations, winning two, going to Susan Shopmaker for casting and with Randolph continuing her sweep of the season’s best supporting actress titles. The film is nominated for five Oscar’s including Best Picture, Film Editing, and Original Screenplay, as well as Giamatti as Best Actor and Randolph for Supporting Actress.

Earlier, on the rain-drenched red carpet — even though it was under a sprawling, hellishly airless marquee — Sessa told me that he finds all the awards hoopla “a bit weird in some ways” but holds out hope that “maybe it gets easier as you keep coming back.” He adds: “For me, I have no expectations about it. There’s something a little wrong with you if this feels normal!”

Both Giamatti and Randolph have spoken during interviews with me of their fondness for Sessa. “He was a pretty grounded, levelheaded person,” says Giamatti of working with the young man. “And I also think his generation is comfortable around cameras, which is a big sort of leg up they have.”

Calling Sessa “wonderful” Giamatti says that he “felt an affection for him” that ”mimicked the movie in a way. I came to really like him even more,and more, and more, as we went on.”

Randolph was equally effusive, saying she was “impressed” how, when watching Sessa on a set for the first time in his life developed “wonderfully in front of us as the filming went on.”

Bob Gendold Wants Live Aid Transfer To Andrew Lloyd Webber-Owned Theatre

Chatted briefly with Bob Geldof, the driving force behind 1985’s Live Aid concerts at London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s Kennedy Stadium, who still runs the Band Aid Charitable Trust, established to help relieve hunger and poverty in Ethiopia.

The trust is the main beneficiary of a percentage of ticket sales and profits from Just For One Day, the show at the Old Vic that revisits Live Aid through the eyes of those who worked on it. The superb cast perform numbers that were sung that day including the hits that continue to rock on through the ages such as Queen’s We Are the Champions.

We spoke at the Charles Finch–Chanel annual pre-BAFTA dinner at the 5 Hertford Street Club in Mayfair.

Geldof says he’s anxious for Just For One Day transfer into one of Lloyd Webbers LW Theatre houses. But the earliest it might become available is in November. If for some reason the building in question doesn’t become free “that will cause a problem for us [at the trust]” because “this show is the only stream of income we have at the moment, and we need it for what’s going on in Ethiopia. It hasn’t gone away.”

 It was a  marvellous sight to behold, observing Geldof sally forth through a series of main rooms and alcoves, drumming up interest in the show among ensembled guests, including the aforementioned Alexander Payne; Donna Langley, chairman of Universal Pictures and Universal Filmed Entertainment Group and Chief Content Officer; Film4 chairman Daniel Battsek, and Ollie Madden, who will be taking over the leadership role; Barbie producer David Heyman, Working Title co-chairman Eric Fellner, Peter Kujawski, chairman of Focus Features, and vice chairman Jason Cassidy.

Later on, in the early hours, seated in the back of a licensed cab, it occurred to me that not once, in my hearing at least, did Geldof, drop an F-bomb. Can the honorary knight of the realm be mellowing with age?

Noted Langley seated at a table surrounded by various Universal division chiefs, filmmakers, and actors, who were all full of admiration. It was fun to observe her as the source of power, like a politician or movie star. It’s quietly, effortlessly done, but it’s there.

And notice too the plaudits that came her way from the Oppenheimer winners on Sunday who were all genuine in their show of respect for Langley. It seemed like a moment to me.

The Finch/Chanel bash heaved with stars.

I spoke with Oppenheimer’s Emily Blunt who says that one of the reasons she’s thrilled about the Oscar and BAFTA nominations is that she gets to “hang out with my Oppenhomies,” a term that Cillian Murphy was to use in his best actor speech at the BAFTAs less than 24 hours later.

Spent a few minutes with The Color Purple’s Fantasia Barrino and Daniel Pemberton, composer of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — both BAFTA nominees — where we joked about Pemberton’s  penchant for sports clothes featuring spidery print designs.

Thrilled to see Samantha Morton there, too. I follow the careers of actors; I watch them on TV, at the movies, and on stage. They always reveal themselves. One never has to search. For me it’s evident within minutes that I must pay attention to a thespian’s performance.

That’s how it was with Morton when she first appeared in TV’s Soldier Soldier in 1991. But it was when she played Tracy, a 15-year-old drug-dependent street girl in Band of Gold, that I knew she was the real deal. This was confirmed when she starred in Carine Adler’s Under the Skin and later in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, where I was unable to leave my seat for 10 minutes after the movie was first screened at Cannes. There were to be many others including Minority Report all the way to the succinctness of her performance in She Said. 

She just couldn’t fathom why BAFTA had chosen to give her a special award. I assured her that the organization hadn’t made a mistake. And her brilliant acceptance speech where she declared that “the stories we tell have the power to change people’s lives” and how she dedicated her honor to “every child in care today, who’s been in care or is suffering, or didn’t survive,” serves to prove that. 

BAFTA 2024 After Dark

Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed should sue the producers of the BAFTA show that commissioned him to perform a skit involving his painfully unfunny alter-ego Mr.Swallow that stopped the ceremony dead in its tracks. The actor rode on stage in roller skates and then quickly exhausted us with hogwash that was meant to make us laugh. Instead, we gasped and eyed the exit signs. 

Whose bright idea was this? Who came up with this tosh?

The night’s host, David Tennant won’t become a regular at this gig. Look, he’s a great actor but hosting requires a different kind of muscle. Come on, the BBC, BAFTA and their collaborators must come up with better than this.

The problem is that presenters shy away from hosting the award show because they’re scared of screwing up. I don’t blame them. Public appearances are scary.

Let’s put Dame Donna Langley on the BAFTA committee, she’d put ‘em right.

At the BAFTA dinner I was seated in the yellow zone.

Over in the green zone: Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas were seated with their family and Donna Langley. Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph hosted their own tables. Erin Corrin and their beau Rami Malek were nearby.   

Retracing my steps back to the yellow zone, I ventured through the ‘purple zone’ and made a break for ‘blue zone’ territory. I spoke to many people.

They included Jim Wilson and Johnnie Burn carrying the trophies they’d won for Film Not in the English Language and Outstanding British Film, a history-making first,and for best sound, shared with Tarn Willers. They were headed away from the South Bank Centre to attend a private gathering being hosted by A24 in a bar at the Rosewood Hotel in Holborn.

Then I stopped by a British Film Institute table and said a brief hello to BFI Film Fund director Mia Bays who was seated next to Ruaridh Mollica star of Mikko Makela’s recent Sundance movie Sebastian.

The film’s expected to have a U.S. distributor soon. A few feet away was the indefatigable Clare Binns, Acquisitions and Programming Director for Picturehouse Entertainment. And I, happily, kept bumping into Vivian Oparah, BAFTA nominated Lead Actress for Rye Lane, while in the red zone, I engaged with her co-star David Jonsson and Olivia Holman, his agent at United Agents. 

I spoke to many more people, then figured, having been on the South Bank estate for over ten hours, the BAFTA after-party wasn’t for me; it was time to hightail it over to the Searchlight Pictures (thank you to their executives for ferrying me across the Thames) party over at Soho House. Disney’s Searchlight had much to celebrate with the five wins for Poor Things.

The sprawling venue was also hosting parties by Disney, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, Amazon, Studiocanel, Sky, Mubi, and Dogwoof. It was all very lively.

Warner Bros. Pictures beckoned around the corner at Kettner’s. The rooms were decked out in rose-pink and silver streamers dangling from rafters. There were bites and bowls of gnocchi and chicken Milanese and plenty of Fanck Pascal, Fluence Brut Nature bubbly for guests to gurgle. I missed seeing Barbie’s Margo Robbie. 

I hailed a waiting cab to whisk me over to the Nomad Hotel for the Universal Pictures festivities celebrating its awards for Oppenheimer and The Holdovers. The place was packed, the dance floor overflowing and the bar brimming.

Upstairs in the main lobby Florence Pugh poked out her tongue to greet me. She does this, I tell myself it’s a form of affection.

The Nolan’s had long departed. Sessa was away checking out the Vogue shindig, so a few of us hopped a cab ride to the Netflix affair over at the Chiltern in Marylebone. 

The streamer did not bring home any trophies, but everybody ends up at Netflix. Once inside, the joint’s wall-to-wall writhing bodies. Could they even breathe?

Yet, somehow Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, and some others managed to hold a conversation.

And here were Peter Kujawski and Jason Cassidy, again. Like seemingly everybody else, they’d skedaddled from their own fetes — or, as in some cases, from their sofas at home — to get on down at the Chiltern-Netflix bash that was in a cool, bonkers zone of its own. 

Netflix was running a strict name-on-the-door or trophy-in-the-hand policy. Or, you just had to be so darn famous that it would have been daft to deny you. But it was pretty clear that not everyone waiting in line was going to gain entry. Cord Jefferson had both an invitation plus the BAFTA mask he won for the adapted screenplay he wrote for American Fiction.

Inside, two private security officials shielded Dua Lipa from the crush.

Over in a quiet bit of space stood Barry Jenkins, in town for a few days to add some music to the Disney live-action Mufasa: The Lion King, at both Abbey Road and Air Studios in north London.

A passing tray of cheeseburger sliders attracted our attention as the clock inched towards two o’clock in the morning, and way beyond.

And still, new waves of party-goers crowded in.

What larks.