Prime Video will be releasing the teaser trailer tomorrow!

TEEN VOGUE – Teen Vogue has an exclusive first look at Prime Video’s adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s beloved novels.
For a subgenre set against the backdrop of one of the world’s most popular winter sports, hockey romance has ironically never been hotter. Following the global success of Heated Rivalry last year, Prime Video is entering the arena with a TV adaptation of Canadian author Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus.

A decade after the book series—which has sold over three million copies—first defined the genre, streaming platforms are finally capitalizing on the growing market for sports romance. In the same vein as Netflix’s Bridgerton, each season of Off Campus—which follows the elite men’s ice hockey team at the fictional Briar University in Massachusetts and the women in their lives—will focus on a different love story while continuing to build out the relationships between the supporting characters.

The first eight-episode season, adapting 2015’s The Deal and debuting in May, explores the unlikely relationship between shy, self-effacing songwriter Hannah Wells (Ella Bright) and all-star hockey captain Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli). The two polar opposites originally cross paths when the classical music major agrees to tutor the popular jock in exchange for making her crush, Justin Kohl (Josh Heuston), jealous. But, naturally, Hannah and Garrett’s fake date quickly becomes something much more real than either of them are willing to admit.

Drawing inspiration from John Hughes’ 1980s coming-of-age classics and the sharp wit of ’90s teen rom-coms like 10 Things I Hate About You, creator and co-showrunner Louisa Levy wants her version of Off Campus to distill the essence of the college years—a period she describes as “this iconic time in our lives.” (The official teaser will be released on Thursday morning.)

“It’s this magical bubble where you’re kind of neither a kid nor an adult, and you’re figuring out who you are, who you want to be, and who you want to fall in love with,” Levy tells Teen Vogue in this exclusive, extended first look at the highly anticipated adaptation, which has already been renewed for a second season. “Those kinds of iconic moments that you’re living through were important to us, because we wanted it to feel familiar but also nostalgic, and aspirational for any high-schoolers watching our show who are not yet in college.”

Prior to being approached by Temple Hill—the production company behind beloved book-to-screen hits such as Twilight, The Fault in Our Stars, Love, Simon, and most recently People We Meet on Vacation—in early 2023, Levy had not read the Off Campus novels. However, as a former ballet dancer and lifelong romance fan who then voraciously “devoured” the source material, she was undaunted by the prospect of turning Kennedy’s works into a multi-season saga.

Given that she closed her deal to make the show just before the Hollywood writers’ strike that year, Levy did not officially begin working on the adaptation until months later—at which point she finally got to meet Kennedy, who is credited as a producer. “She wasn’t in the writers’ room, but she read all the scripts and watched all the cuts,” Levy reveals of the author’s involvement. “She gave us her blessing to play with these characters.”

By the time they began casting the show early last year, Levy and her co-showrunner Gina Fattore, along with their writers’ room, had already penned the entire first season. Knowing that they would need to find performers who could tackle both light and heavy material ideally across multiple years, the producers scheduled a full day of chemistry reads for the final round of auditions. According to Levy, 22 actors tested for seven main characters at the same time, with candidates being mixed and matched throughout the day to test for different pairings.

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.)

The invested and eager fandom around the Off Campus novels will surely scrutinize every aspect of this adaptation, which has reimagined several plot points in different settings and contexts. For instance, the pilot introduces the leads with a split-screen montage that ends with Hannah accidentally catching a glimpse of Garrett in his birthday suit on campus. “What you first see is they both have similar music tastes,” Bright teases of that opener. “They are from very separate worlds. Hannah herself is not too big of an ice hockey fan, but I think the use of split-screen, even though they’re in completely different areas, just shows that there will be a connection.”

“It’s really important to us to honor how steamy and spicy those books are, but it’s a while in that first book before Hannah and Garrett have any [intimacy],” Levy explains. “We wanted to show the book fans from jump that we were going to honor that, even though ironically it’s kind of a departure from the book to show them that. And [for] anyone who wasn’t a book fan, we wanted to show them that this show is going to go there. It’s not a teenage romance. This is a college-age romance.”

The scene immediately after that montage is the opening chapter of The Deal, in which Hannah and Garrett get a graded assignment back in their shared class. Levy wanted to establish the idea early on that Hannah and Garrett had been in each other’s orbits at Briar, but their paths had never crossed before. “We wanted to show that in a very visual way, because we don’t have the ability to drop into the character’s heads and get their inner monologue the way Elle does so beautifully in her books,” she adds. “I had to take the books and externalize all of those inner thoughts, and this is one way that we did it.”

Eagle-eyed viewers will immediately notice that Garrett has a tattoo across his shoulder blades that reads “nullum gratuitum prandium,” a Latin phrase that translates to “there is no free lunch.” The ink was specifically Cameli’s idea. “What essentially it means is that everything in life is earned. Everything has a cost; nothing comes free,” explains Cameli, revealing the phrase was actually his high-school wrestling team’s mantra. “It’s a core tenet of who [Garrett] is that he refuses to let anything be handed to him. He wants to deserve all of the accolades and achievements that he has.”

“So having it across his back, I thought was a nice place for it because when he has the jersey on, it says Graham right there,” Cameli continues. “But when he peels the jersey off, just on his own skin, you get to see that phrase really encapsulate who he is.”

As they grow closer, Hannah and Garrett are both left to grapple with their own emotional baggage, baring the most vulnerable parts of themselves to each other. After being sexually assaulted in high school, Hannah left her small hometown a couple years ago for a fresh start. “We meet her [at] a very healed place. She knows who she is. She’s not defined by the rape, but obviously you see through flashbacks, there are certain things that trigger her,” Bright says. Though she initially writes Garrett off, Hannah learns that he is more than meets the eye. “His protectiveness and just overall genuine kindness leads her to really trust him with big steps in her life.”

Garrett, meanwhile, has spent his entire life trying to outrun the shadow of his former hockey superstar father, Phil Graham (played by Shameless star Steve Howey), who is more interested in carrying on his legacy than caring about his only child. Garrett’s biggest trigger is the suggestion that he is anything like his old man.

The TV adaptation will flesh out Phil’s motivations a little more than in the novel. “Phil doesn’t think he’s a villain. He thinks he’s doing the right thing for his kid,” Levy says. “Garrett’s deepest desire is that his dad could reform so that he can have a relationship with his dad. We were really curious what would happen if he starts to hope that maybe that the man is not what he was. It was also important to us, as a writers’ room, that we didn’t wrap it up neatly and tidily in a bow, because that’s not how life is.”

Over the course of the season, “Garrett is really constantly wrestling with control—over his life, over his output on the ice, over his academics, over everything. He’s constantly fighting for control over his individuality,” Cameli explains. “When he meets Hannah, he sees this freedom and passion, and she has this spirit. She really brings certain things out of him that are not innate to him, which is really beautiful. As he starts to fall in love, he starts to get closer to those parts of himself—and you see him wrestling with control even further.”

Between their characters, Bright and Cameli both agree that Garrett falls for Hannah first. “Hannah is too busy with her crush on Justin Kohl to realize that there’s anything going on,” Bright says. But the co-leads believe that, once their feelings begin to creep to the surface, their characters fall equally hard for each other.

“There’s different episodes for Hannah and Garrett where they both truly realize the effect that the other has had on them,” Bright says, singling out episode 5 as a particularly “special” episode for Garrett. Cameli adds, “This is a really impactful first love for both of them, so you get to see each of them falling really hard, taking turns, together.”

In keeping with Kennedy’s sex-positive novels, as well as the romance genre as a whole, a lot of Hannah and Garrett’s love story is told through sex. Book readers will surely take pleasure in knowing that many of the sex scenes from the book have been adapted for the small screen. “Nothing we do on the show in sex is gratuitous, so the conversations we had around the sex scenes were just as varied and specific as they were about Thanksgiving or they were about sitting next to each other in class,” Cameli notes. “The real reason we’re showing that level of intimacy in the show is to further the romance story and to give you another glimpse behind the curtain of who these people are.”

Cameli reiterates that “there’s nothing inherently sexy about filming a sex scene”—all of the movements were carefully choreographed with their intimacy coordinator Katherine Kadler, and the co-stars could hear the sounds of crew members breathing and moving as cameras rolled—but he and Bright tried to have “fun on those days just like we did any other day.”

“One of my favorite days on set was, after we had filmed one of the [sex] montages, Belmont ordered, I think, 43 pizzas for the cast and crew, and we all were like, ‘Well done! We finished that day of work!’” Bright recalls with a laugh. “Every day on that shoot was genuinely so fun. Obviously, there are some challenging aspects to it, [it’s] very emotionally heavy in some parts, but the sex scenes are so earned. It felt like the right thing to do for the story.”

But in a dramatic departure from the novel, Hannah’s crush Justin is a fellow musician, rather than a football player. Levy chose to make that change for a couple of reasons: She wanted to highlight that Hannah has a type—“artsy guys”—and “Garrett is not the person she had on the agenda for herself.” This iteration of Hannah is also “not a fully realized singer-songwriter yet, and part of what she’s crushing on with Justin is … she wants to be able to do what he does. So it allowed us, yet again, to externalize what is internal.”

Ironically, Bright and Cameli seemingly felt less fear about their onscreen intimacy and more trepidation about the additional skills they had to acquire in a matter of months. Bright had very little singing experience before she landed the role. But, like Hannah, she found her voice gradually.

“Singing was probably one of my biggest fears and insecurities ever before starting the show,” Bright admits. “I remember throughout the audition process, the only thing I had to really send in was just one video of me singing. It was a minute-long clip of me, mostly just playing my very amateur-level guitar. I sang three lines, and I was like, ‘That’s it. That’s all I can show them.’ And when I got the part, I was like, ‘Oh no, now they’re going to figure out I’m a fraud. I can’t sing!’”

“We learned that was not true very quickly,” Cameli interjects.

“Well, thank you. This show has definitely helped me grow so much in my confidence,” Bright says. She and her co-star Heuston learned how to play piano and guitar from scratch and play the instruments in the show. “We have four original songs in total in the show written by our amazing music team and a really incredible songwriter called Amy Allen [who has penned hits for Sabrina Carpenter and Harry Styles, among many, many others]. It was such an honor to be able to do that and to hear Hannah’s voice and music come off the page and into the show.”

The boys of Briar U were given the more physical task of looking semi-convincing as elite hockey players. While Stephen Kalyn, who plays the womanizing Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis, has played hockey all his life, Cipriano had only skated recreationally; Cameli and Jalen Thomas Brooks, who plays John Tucker, had never even skated before. To get themselves up to snuff, the guys were required to do a two-week bootcamp before the start of filming.

As a lifelong athlete, Cameli found the experience of trying not to look like Bambi on ice “very, very frustrating” and humbling. “I’m using parts of my hips and butt that I didn’t even know existed,” he quips. “But on the other side of that frustration, it felt really rewarding. Over the course of those couple weeks, I got to a place where I could skate fast and stop hard, and I was really satisfied with that. And the days where we would shoot, we’d be on the ice for 14 hours, so that was another opportunity to get better as well. We were all out there as much as we could be, as long as we weren’t bumping into the expensive cameras that we used to shoot the show.”

Cameli, whose stunt double is current New York Rangers defenseman Vincent Iorio, had previously considered himself a “really big hockey fan, especially when my Chicago Blackhawks were in their dynasty run in the mid-2010s.” But starring in Off Campus has now given him a newfound appreciation for the sport. “I’ve been going to games all winter long. I truly consider myself a real hockey fan now,” he says.

In fact, Cameli was calling in last week from Vancouver, where the guys are doing another two-week bootcamp before beginning production on season 2 in June. Much like their teammate characters, the co-stars are all “very competitive” with each other, with Cameli claiming he is now the fastest of the group. “I couldn’t really be competitive in the beginning, because I could barely stand upright for the first week. But later on, I just learned so quickly—and now I’m like a blur out there. [The other guys] are trying their best, but I think they won’t reach my top speed, which is, I guess, disappointing for them.”

The actors will hopefully have a lot more time to refine those skills in the years to come. Though Levy has yet to reveal her long-term plans for the Off Campus universe, the show could conceiveably last at least five seasons to match the number of books. Kennedy herself has also created multiple spinoff series, so “just because [a character’s] not in the show yet doesn’t mean that we don’t have plans for them in the future,” Levy hints.

With an eye to the future, Levy and her writers have planted seeds that, in success, will come to fruition down the line. “We aged down Tucker, for instance. He’s the oldest in the books, and he’s the youngest in our series,” she explains. “That’s just because his [story] is the fourth book, and we want to make sure he’s still in college by the time we get there. We don’t want to be forced to overlap timelines in the same way if that doesn’t make sense for us. We want to keep driving the story forward, and we don’t want to be limited in that regard.”

But, at the end of the day, Levy just hopes that Off Campus readers will be satisfied with her creative team’s take on The Deal. “We scoured the books and we did a lot of work to try to fold in as many of those Easter eggs as possible,” she says. “Some of them are real moments, but maybe they don’t take place in the order of the books. So I would say look out for the similarities that might not come the way you expect.”