Exclusive Interview
‘Off Campus’ Stars Explain Hannah & Garrett’s Locker Room Meet-Cute Change (VIDEO)
What To Know
- Off Campus Season 1 shifts Hannah and Garrett’s meet-cute to a locker room shower scene.
- It’s a change from Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus books, which Season 1 is based on.
- Actors Ella Bright and Belmont Cameli explain how it sets up their characters’ dynamic and what it was like filming the scene.
It’s no secret that Hannah and Garrett have plenty of steamy moments in Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus books, and Prime Video’s TV adaptation of the hockey romance will be no different. What is different, however, is that Garrett (Belmont Cameli) and Hannah’s (Ella Bright) meet-cute is seriously heated. Season 1 moves their first interaction from a Briar University classroom to the locker room showers.
Bright and Cameli are all here for the change, which was revealed in Season 1’s teaser trailer. At Creation Entertainment‘s Page, Screen, and Everything in Between convention on May 10, the actors shared their take on the meet-cute, which isn’t really their first meeting. They’ve encountered each other before at Hannah’s other part-time job — waitressing at Malone’s, a restaurant near campus — but the hockey-focused Garrett has never really registered the music major’s presence.
In Episode 1, Hannah is working at the rink and cleaning up the locker room when she stumbles across a naked Garrett in the shower. The sight makes Hannah short-circuit and rush out of the room, while Garrett remains as cool as a cucumber. “I’m glad that the water was warm,” Cameli quipped. “I was so scared it was gonna be cold, but they kept it nice and steamy.”
View this post on Instagram
The sequence only takes a few moments, but the stars say that wasn’t the case behind the scenes. “Oh, 30… Hours,” Cameli corrected himself when asked how he stood under the water. Bright added, “The shower actually broke at one point.”
Even after that, Garrett still doesn’t even know Hannah’s name when he asks her to tutor him later in the episode. He sits behind Hannah in their shared philosophy class, noticing she got an A on a paper that he and the rest of the class bombed. In Kennedy’s The Deal, Garrett first speaks to Hannah when she drops her belongings on the way out of class. As he helps her pick them up, he spots her essay grade, leading to the tutoring request.
“I think [the meet-cute change] is great, because obviously in the books, it’s a first-person narration, so it’s hard to kind of let the audience understand that they’ve been in each other’s orbit,” Bright explained. “Hannah knows who Garrett is, but he doesn’t know who she is. And it’s kind of like [he’s] the hockey god around school. There’s a way to translate that that we had to show without using voiceover.”
Off Campus, Season 1, May 13, Prime Video
