Belmont Cameli Reveals He Never Ice-Skated Before Off Campus

Charm seems to come naturally to the men of Off Campus, Prime Video’s record-setting romance series. Hockey skills, on the other hand? Well...

Stephen Kalyn (who plays Dean) grew up playing hockey in Canada, but his castmates were all pretty new to the sport. In fact, as Belmont Cameli recently told Bustle, he’d never been on the ice in any capacity before landing the role of Garrett Graham on Off Campus.

“I had never skated on ice before until this job, not even a little bit. Not even once for a birthday party,” he says, adding that he fluctuated between “pure rage and frustration” trying to get the hang of skating.

“Like, if I was the one buying my hockey sticks, I would have broken so many of them,” he continues. “But of course, Amazon is providing them to me, so I’m respecting their property.”

But there’s a bright side to being a newbie, Cameli acknowledges, “Some days it really pisses me off, and then on other days, it’s the greatest feeling in the world, which is that feeling that you chase as an athlete all the time, and it’s super rewarding to finally learn a movement.”

Going into Season 2, Cameli has made a lot of progress. “I can kind of scrimmage now,” he says. “So going from Baby Bambi to where I’m at now is a good feeling.”

The 28-year-old might not have grown up on the ice, but he’s no stranger to sports, having participated in swimming, soccer, and baseball as a younger kid (“I retired from baseball at the ripe old age of 12, and I started umpiring for Little League,” he says). In high school, he played football, volleyball, and was in wrestling.

“Athletics is a huge part of my identity,” Cameli says. “I make a lot of parallels [from] being an actor to being a teammate within a sport. There are a lot of similarities that I find.”

Indeed, the success of Off Campus lies not only in its dreamy romance but in the chemistry of its ensemble as a whole — and it sounds like the stars rallied together as a team from Day 1. As Kalyn recently shared with Bustle, the cast found their groove in many of the same ways their characters would have. “Just being dudes in the locker room, beating each other up, just throwing each other around and falling down on the ice,” he says of bonding as a group. “It was really, really nice.”