Belmont Cameli’s Winning Season

When Belmont Cameli landed in Brazil a week before the premiere of his buzzy romantic drama series Off Campus, a surprising sight awaited him: fans. “When I got in this morning, there were people at the airport, which was a first for me,” Cameli tells me over Zoom from his hotel room in São Paulo, where he and the cast attended Off Campus’ Brazil premiere in early May. As anyone who has lurked in the comments of a celebrity’s Instagram can attest, the passion of Brazilian fans is famously intense, and from the videos they posted of his arrival, Cameli was happy to bask in it for a moment, gamely posing for photos and even signing fans’ shirts on his way out. “It’s very cool to be a part of a show that has such a fervent existing fan base,” he says. “I don’t really get overwhelmed. I just take it day by day.”

The 28-year-old actor stars as college hockey hotshot Garrett Graham in the television adaptation of the wildly popular book series by Elle Kennedy. Since the first novel, The Deal, hit bookshelves in 2015, fans have been clamoring to see the love story between Garrett and straight-A music major Hannah Wells (Ella Bright) — classmates whose fake romance to make her crush jealous turns into something more — come to life on-screen. After all eight episodes dropped on in mid-May on Amazon Prime Video, viewers are simply in shambles, as they dissect, giggle, and even cry over its charming romance, steamy sex scenes, and the characters’ past traumas.

If Cameli seems unfazed by all the fanfare, it’s because he knows a thing or two about hardcore fandom. The moment I mention that I’m Zooming from Chicago, where he grew up, the topic immediately turns to our shared teams. “I’m insufferable about Chicago sports. I talk about it all the time. It’s like my whole personality. I have nothing without it,” he says. He even got his Off Campus co-stars rooting for the Bears. “We were all in L.A. for a Vanity Fair party in January, and I couldn’t go to the party until the Bears game was over. So everybody came to my hotel room to watch the end of the game. We ended up winning in Caleb Williams fashion” — taking the lead in the last seconds of the game — “which was awesome.”

Like his football team, Cameli may also be entering a winning season. With audiences still burning up over Heated Rivalry, Off Campus is making a power play to become Hollywood’s new obsession, with its own emotionally repressed hockey hunk and glimpses of enviable glutes. “I think the draw for why romance plays well in the world of hockey is because hockey players are usually more reserved. They’re quieter. It’s a very masculine sport to play. There’s literally fighting in it,” Cameli says. “And to see those players with their layers peeled back, and watch them fall in and out of love, is a great juxtaposition of masculinity. Heated Rivalry absolutely got it right.”

That’s part of what drew Cameli to Off Campus; he found a “real softness” in Garrett, a true jock whose combo of charm and bravado never tips too far into jerk territory. While his relationship with Hannah deepens, he’s also working through the death of his mother and the domestic abuse they faced at the hands of his father, a hockey legend whose shadow complicates Garrett’s semi-tortured relationship with the sport.

“One of the first things out of my mouth was ‘Does Garrett even like hockey?’” Cameli recalls asking the showrunners before auditioning. “And they both laughed because that is the crux of Garrett’s individual story in Season 1. Then we had a long-winded conversation about that topic, and since that moment, I never gave myself an answer on that. I would do some scenes where the answer is yes, and some scenes where the answer is no, that he’s doing it because he has to.”

“I realized that I was going to find fulfillment elsewhere — but it wasn’t going to be as a financial broker for JPMorgan or something.”

It was something Cameli could relate to. “When you grow up in the suburbs, you go to a big state school in the Midwest, you get a degree, and then you go join the workforce in Chicago, and that was always my dream as a kid — because I had never considered outside of the bounds of that until I got to college,” he says. He briefly attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “I was studying economics, finance, and marketing, and I was certainly capable and mildly interested, but I knew inherently that the lifestyle was going to drive me up a f*cking wall. So I realized that I was going to find fulfillment elsewhere — but it wasn’t going to be as a financial broker for JPMorgan or something.”

That he’d pick acting instead came as a surprise to his friends and family; he was more jock than theater kid in high school, though he loved fooling around with iMovie and making home movies with his siblings on the family MacBook. “When I asked myself the big question of ‘OK, if I could do anything, what would I do for work?’ — that was the first thing that popped into my head,” he says. “I was like that’s the most enjoyable use of my time.”

“Obviously, I’m being sexualized to an extent because I’m naked in the TV show, but I never felt like it was gratuitous.”

So, in 2019, he moved to Los Angeles, and within two months booked his breakout role on Peacock’s deeply underrated Saved by the Bell reboot. While the series only lasted two seasons, the experience was “formative” for Cameli, who lit up the ensemble as the adorably goofy quarterback Jamie Spano, the son of OG Elizabeth Berkley’s Jessie. “I really cut my teeth on that production. I wish more people had watched it because I really believed in that comedy.”

Supporting roles in Netflix’s Along for the Ride and horror film Until Dawn followed, but he was “champing at the bit to lead a production — not just to be the main character, but to be on set every day, have a real fingerprint on the morale of a set, and set a good precedent,” he says (spoken like a true team captain). With Off Campus, “I think I’ve done that, and I’m really proud of the work I did on Season 1.”

One way he set the vibe: the “Belmont House” parties he threw for the cast (almost) every Friday while they filmed the first season last year. “We’d do costume parties because, for the life of me, I brought so much clothes to Vancouver for the summer. I brought multiple suits. I had tons of jerseys,” he says. “We would eat Church’s Chicken and all wear matching outfits and basically stay up until 9 or 10 a.m., and then I would kick everybody out and go to sleep.”

Around this point in our conversation, Cameli starts to worry about his laptop’s battery, so he switches to his phone where his username curiously changes to “Spicy Bel.” It’s a fitting coincidence as we start talking about the show’s steamier moments. “Obviously, I’m being sexualized to an extent because I’m naked in the TV show, but I never felt like it was gratuitous,” he says, adding that the show’s “female gaze lens” came directly from the books’ POV. “I always felt like any lack of clothing was serving the story, and we were really intentional about the show being hot and sexy and appealing to women while maintaining a true and honest throughline about their stories.”

“We would eat Church’s Chicken and all wear matching outfits and basically stay up until 9 or 10 a.m., and then I would kick everybody out and go to sleep.”

Cameli — and Bright, and the showrunners and intimacy coordinators — wanted sex scenes to feel earned. “We don’t want to just throw them up on screen and light them well and throw some atmosphere in there. That’s not what our show is. Our show is showing these people’s vulnerable moments at this formative part in their lives,” he continues. “Hopefully audiences can relate that sex is sometimes great and sometimes not, and sometimes comfortable and sometimes not. That’s what sex is like when you’re in college.”

Working on Off Campus has turned Cameli into a “fan of romance,” he says. “I feel like it’s having a real resurgence right now,” he adds, nodding not just to Heated Rivalry but The Summer I Turned Pretty, too. “These romance shows are meaningful. There’s camps of people who watch it for pure entertainment, and people who are hate-watching that stuff — but they’re still watching — and then there are people who are really relating to the characters. And a lot of folks find themselves somewhere in the middle of both camps, but it’s resonant, and our show is too.”

Given the explosive star-minting power of these shows, and the fact that Season 2 of Off Campus is already in the works — in a show of confidence, Amazon renewed it three months before it even premiered — those fans who were waiting for Cameli at the airport might not be so anomalous for much longer. Is he ready for that?

“I’m of the school of two thoughts,” he says, rubbing his hand down his face. “A: Stand where your feet are. I’m always reminding myself to do that. I’m a very present person. And B: All I do is strive to collect information and make choices with the information I have. So once I start collecting more information, I’d be able to answer this better. But for now, it's just something that might happen to me.”

Still, there’s at least one perk of his growing celebrity he’s excited about. “Oh — I’m going to throw the first pitch when the White Sox host the Cubs,” he tells me as we wrap up our call, his eyes lighting up before smirking. “The Cubs asked me to throw it out, and I said no. And then I screenshotted it, and I sent it to [their crosstown rival] the White Sox, and the White Sox said, ‘Yes.’ It’s a dream come true. I cried once we confirmed it. I was in shambles.”

Top image credit: Prada clothing and shoes; Maor ring.