During their global talent search, the producers came across a self-tape audition from Bright that completely took them by surprise. “We were all just like, ‘Who is this girl? Oh my God, she can sing; she’s just captivating,’” Levy recalls. But they had a significantly harder time picturing who should play Garrett, who needed to be “very guarded up-top” but still charismatic. Instead of going through a traditional audition process, Levy and Fattore scheduled meetings with prospective Garretts.
After chatting with Cameli for an hour on Zoom, the showrunners felt strongly that he would be the right fit, but he still needed to read for the role. What sealed the deal “wasn’t actually Bel and Ella in the room together for the first time. It was Belmont and Antonio [Cipriano], who plays [John] Logan,” Levy clarifies. Cameli and Cirpriano read a scene at the end of episode 4, in which Garrett and Logan are sitting on a players’ bench at the empty rink late at night. “Bel and Antonio had just met an hour before, but we felt how much their characters cared about each other. They also had that small zing of competition because they both have the same dream, only Garrett has had every opportunity in his life and Logan has not.”
But when they did have Bright and Cameli in the room to read their first scene, one from episode 2, “sparks flew,” Levy says. “It’s actually [Hannah and Garrett’s] first kiss scene. They did not kiss in the chemistry reads, but they got real close and it was steamy.”
Even the actors themselves could feel a shift in the energy of the room that day. “I had done it maybe a couple times with some other people and felt good, but when Ella and I got in there to do that, it felt like a different thing,” Cameli tells Teen Vogue in his and Bright’s first interview about Off Campus. “It felt like, ‘Oh man, this feels true and real, and just really honest.’”
“I was in the room, and it was a circle of guys coming through [one after another]. It was quite a strange experience,” Bright adds with a laugh. But once she read with Cameli, “he left the room, and we all looked around and were like, ‘That’s Garrett, for sure.’”
To hear them describe it, Bright and Cameli were not completely aware of what they were signing up for. Having previously seen the Off Campus books in passing on “BookTok”—the subcommunity of book readers on TikTok—Bright skimmed an online copy of The Deal to cobble together as many details about Hannah as possible before her auditions. Cameli, on the other hand, was completely in the dark about the insatiable demand for spicy romance, even within his own inner circle.
“In my group of friends, [I thought] nobody had read much smut, more specifically in the hockey romance genre,” Cameli says. “But when I got the job, suddenly, everybody around me was letting me know that not only have they read these books, but that they love them. And now I do too. I understand the appeal.” (Even now, Bright and Cameli sheepishly admit that they have only read The Deal and will only read one Off Campus book for every season that gets greenlit.)
