This time around, Belmont Cameli will be bringing fewer clothes.
The 28-year-old actor, in the midst of a major breakout thanks to Prime series “Off Campus,” is still in New York wrapping up press for Season One at the time of this interview, and is due back on set in Vancouver in a mere five days to begin work on the second season.
“I’m so sick of going back to storage that I’ve just been traveling with two pairs of pants in one bag,” Cameli says. “Last year when I went to Vancouver, I brought way too much s–t — which ended up being fun because I hosted everyone on Friday nights [for] costume parties with all the clothes I had. But I say all of that to say, my life has become far more minimalist.”
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Cameli stars as Garrett Graham in “Off Campus,” a Prime Video series adaptation of the hit Elle Kennedy book series. The first season, based on Kennedy’s 2015 book “The Deal,” follows hockey star Graham, who offers to swap dating advice with music major Hannah Wells in exchange for tutoring sessions. The series has blown up since its release in mid-May, becoming the third most-viewed debut season of any series in Prime Video history.
“I don’t think it’s even hit me yet,” Cameli says of the show’s instant success. “At some point in the near future I will have a moment of reflection, but the only real way it’s reached me is that I’ve been getting a bunch of texts from my friends and family that they’ve been doing watch parties, and I have noticed the Instagram following go up a slight tick in the last day. But other than that, I’m still very focused on promoting the show. So that’s how I’ve been spending my time.”
After receiving an email about the show, Cameli spent 90 minutes on Zoom discussing Garrett’s storyline with the show’s team.
“I had a lot of questions for them,” he says. “I was really interested to see where this show falls within this genre, which is so popular in television, the romance genre. I found pretty instantly through that conversation that there was a lot of meat on the bone for not only Garrett’s story, but everybody’s and that it was a real true ensemble show.”
His first question about Garrett was if he even liked playing hockey, because he’d been pushed to pursue it his whole life. Cameli grew up an athlete before focusing on acting around age 19, and while he jumped between several sports, he had friends who lived the kind of dedication to one that Garrett does.
“I have friends too who started something really early and burnt out at it because they had a coach or a parent who wanted to see them succeed, sometimes even more than the kid did,” he says. “So that was a familiar story to me. And so I was really intrigued by that dynamic for Garrett.”
Cameli grew up outside of Chicago and, after one year at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign decided to drop out once it became clear to him he “didn’t want to graduate with a finance degree and move to the big city and work in corporate America.”
He’d always loved movies and had been making his own amateur projects with his siblings and friends as kids, and decided to pursue filmmaking after his stint at school.
“I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to be a filmmaker. That was kind of the idea — it still is the idea. Acting is really the first step in that dream, but it felt like the first thing that I needed to learn,” he says.
He signed with an agency in Chicago, kept at it with auditioning and moved to L.A. toward the end of 2019, booking his first series regular role soon after, in the reboot of “Saved by the Bell.”
“That’s really where I cut my teeth. That was my film school,” he says.
“Off Campus” shot last summer, well before “Heated Rivalry” captivated the world with the concept of a hockey romance series, which has certainly been an added boon to “Off Campus.”
“My first instinct when seeing the success of ‘Heated Rivalry’ was not to compare it to our show, but to celebrate the success that it was. Anytime you can make something that feels original, that can resonate with that broad audience, that’s a huge success for storytellers,” he says. “And then between their show and ours the U.S. men’s and women’s teams brought home the gold [Olympic medal]. And so I think it all begets an appreciation for our show and vice versa. I’m just happy to be part of the conversation.”