Belmont Cameli on Off Campus, Heated Rivalry Comparisons, What’s Next
Belmont Cameli stars as Garrett Graham in the new Prime Video series ‘Off Campus.’
Photography by Zachary Shea; Styling by Sydney Lopez; Grooming by Aika Flores; Wearing Calvin Klein
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Belmont Cameli is in the midst of a truly chaotic promotion week. “It’s been crazy. I can’t believe it’s coming to an end,” the 28-year-old jokes on a Zoom with The Hollywood Reporter.
It’s midday in New York, and the Illinois-born actor has just raced back to his hotel room for this conversation. It’s been a day since the release of his new Prime Video series, Off Campus, and he’s almost grateful for the sheer amount of press and activity that have prevented him from falling into the time old tradition of online doomscrolling.
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“The only response [to the show] that I’ve been privy to are the text messages I’ve been receiving, which are mostly from my friends and family — and also from some people I haven’t talked to in a really long time,” Cameli says. The actor’s friends and family have been sending him photos of their watch parties to let him know they’re watching.
In the series, Cameli plays Garrett Graham, an NHL-bound college hockey captain and son of a legendary professional player. The father-son pair have an exceedingly complicated relationship that much of Garrett’s internal conflict stems from. Based on the book series by O.G. hockey romance author Elle Kennedy, Off Campus is the latest sports romance offering to hit streaming.
The series follows a college hockey team and the women in their lives at Briar University, tackling the typical college woes, along with some heavier topics. The show has taken a page out of the Bridgerton playbook and will tap different couples to lead each season. The first season focuses on Cameli’s Garrett and his love interest, music student Hannah Wells (Ella Bright), following the plot of Kennedy’s first book in the series, The Deal.
Off Campus came on the heels of Cameli’s roles in the video game adaptation film Until Dawn and Robert Di Niro’s The Alto Knights — the first projects the actor did following stint of inactivity. “I had two years where I had worked only a few days on stuff right around the strike, so I was in the middle of a lull in my career when I booked Until Dawn,” he says, adding it was a big moment for him.
“When I started out, I was busy right away. I started out pretty hot,” says Cameli. “Then I feel like I paid my dues for a bit, and I really struggled for a couple years.”
The 28-year-old actor says his friends and family have been hosting viewing parties, sending him selfies while he’s off promoting the show.
Photography by Zachary Shea; Styling by Sydney Lopez; Grooming by Aika Flores; Wearing Calvin Klein
Cameli, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, actually never had any intention to be an actor. “I was in college and was studying finance. College was just not a good environment for me, and my father passed right when I got to school,” he says. “All of a sudden, life felt really short, and it felt really important that I figured out what I wanted to do.”
The loss put everything into a new perspective for him. “At the time, I was just doing the thing that I was supposed to be doing. You go to a big state school. You get a degree. You go to Chicago. You work in corporate America, the whole nine yards,” Cameli says. “As soon as I considered what that would look like and that there was a possibility of doing anything else, I got the hell out of there because I knew I was going to be miserable.”
The change in mindset led him taking modeling gigs in Chicago and eventually being signed by an acting agency in the city. The actor, despite how “daunting” and “scary” the process of shifting gears was, never hesitated. Adds Cameli, “I’m a really hardheaded and stubborn person, so I just decided to do it.”
Cameli found out about Off Campus in the wake of The Alto Knights. He recalls that there wasn’t a ton of auditions at the time, so he and his actor friends were all aware of the project. “I’d read the pilot, and I wanted to talk to the creators. I took a meeting with Gina [Fattore] and Louisa [Levy],” he says. The trio talked for an hour or two about the character and the complicated relationships at play.
“I was really fired up about the prospect of getting to play Garrett Graham after that conversation,” the actor says. He admits that new adult, the popular romance genre focused on college and 20-something characters, wasn’t the first genre he was chomping at the bit to do, b