Exclusive Interview

‘Off Campus’ Boss Explains Jules Addition, Hunter Davenport Shocker & More Book Twists

When we sat down with Off Campus showrunner Louisa Levy ahead of the Season 1 premiere, she explained, “It really was important to us to do our best and honor the books in every way possible.” (Warning: Season 1 spoilers ahead!)

From giving Logan (Antonio Cipriano) a new sibling, Jules (Julia Sarah Stone), who serves as Briar’s Deux Moi-style hockey gossip blogger, to adding an unexpected character from Elle Kennedy‘s spinoff Briar U book series into the narrative, Season 1 of the Off Campus adaptation is anything but a verbatim copy of The Deal, in the best possible way. After all, “it was over a decade ago when these books came out.”

As book adaptation lovers know by now, nothing is more important than getting the heart of the story on the page, even if it means making some unexpected additions (Hello, Hunter Davenport!), cutting characters from the original (Sorry, Cass!), and weaving together the plots of more than one book in the original series.

Of course, we had to ask about debuting Allie (Mika Abdalla) and Dean’s (Stephen Kalyn) The Score romance before Hannah (Ella Bright) and Garrett’s (Belmont Cameli) happily ever after. As Levy put it, “Their love story does start as a secret, so I thought it would be fun to introduce that as a secret from the audience as well.” Trust us, we were shocked!

Scroll to read our full conversation with Louisa Levy about the reasoning behind the biggest changes between The Deal and Off Campus Season 1!

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Swooon: How did you decide what to keep and what to change from the original Elle Kennedy books?

Louisa Levy: We are doing our best to stay true to the books and the spirit of the books. We, of course, only have eight episodes, and it’s also a TV show, so there are certain things that have to change, because we don’t have the benefit of being inside the characters’ heads the way you do in a novel. So our North Star was always, does it feel like it honors the books? And whenever the answer was yes, we felt like that was the right, the right choice. There were some changes, but we felt like they were always in service of honoring the books.

Swooon: I’d love to start by chatting about Jules. Now that Logan has a younger sibling in school with him, rather than an older brother who doesn’t go to Briar, could that change impact his book storyline?

Levy: Well, we still have the older sibling. He’s just off camera. I don’t know yet if we’ll end up meeting him or not, but the younger sibling in school with them was [for a few different reasons]. We wanted to have a character who would be able to provide commentary on the hockey for the audience members who might not be as familiar, to understand what’s going on. Jules felt like someone who had immediate access to the hockey crowd felt right.

And then we also just felt like we wanted a character who had their finger on the pulse of the gossip happening on campus, because it enabled us to shine a light on —especially with this fake dating storyline that Hannah and Garrett are going through — what gossip on campus might feel like. So we’re able to kill two birds with one stone and create a fun new character without erasing Jeff, Logan’s older brother, from the storyline at all. He’s just not at Briar.

Jules blended in pretty naturally. It really felt important to me to have a character who is used to adapting and fitting into spaces, and also maybe a less expected person to exist in that hockey space. But I really loved that the guys take Jules as their sibling as well, and so they rib Jules, they tease Jules, but they also love Jules, and that felt important to me.

Swooon: Could we see a Jules romance storyline sometime in the future?

Levy: Listen, never say never. I would love that.

Swooon: In the adaptation, Hannah kisses Logan instead of Dean during the locker room kissing practice scene. What can you tell me about that switch-up?

Levy: Obviously, I love that scene from the book, but it really felt like, again, we are a TV show, so we only have a limited amount of time to tell these stories, and it felt like replacing it with Logan helped further his crush on Hannah, which will help set up his story eventually down the line.

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Swooon: As a viewer, one of the most shocking twists during Season 1 was that you chose to include some of the plot and scenes from The Score. Why did you want to interweave Allie and Dean’s story with Hannah and Garrett’s?

Levy: It felt really organic because Allie and Hannah are best friends, so she’s already part of the world, and their love story does start as a secret, so I thought it would be fun to introduce that as a secret from the audience as well. We also have a moment in our season when Hannah and Garrett (spoiler alert) break up, and we wanted to make sure that there’s another couple keeping the energy and the love story alive at that point, even when we have a heartbroken couple. So there’s always someone who kind of is driving the romance forward in the show.

Swooon: You get pretty far into The Score in Season 1, ending with that massive Hunter Davenport (Charlie Evans) twist. Can you tell me about going off-book with that? Can we expect more off-book narratives from here?

Levy: Yeah, so that is a launching point to hopefully explore some of Dean’s backstory in Season 2. But it really was an opportunity to put a little bit of a twist in their storyline and prolong it just a little bit, so that we have lots of room to play with them in future seasons. And we also wanted to nod to the book fans that we might have some other characters that you might not expect showing up in fun ways.

Swooon: Another fan-favorite moment from the book is Garrett’s hands-off rule, which you poke at a little bit, saying Garrett Graham would never do that. Why did you want to make that change?

Levy: So that was one of the scenes that we really wanted to put in the show because it is such a fan-favorite moment. But when we made this crucial change that Garrett breaks up with Hannah instead of the other way around, it made that moment a little bit harder.

The big reason why we changed who breaks up with whom is that it was over a decade ago when these books came out. At the time, athletes were not allowed to make money off of their image and likeness, and now they are. And the reason for Hannah breaking up with Garrett is so financially driven in the book that it was hard for us to earn that in this story. But it felt true to Garrett, and where he is at this point in the season, that he might be afraid of becoming his father, and therefore want to break up with Hannah for that reason.

Unfortunately, when that happens, it is a little harder for him to spread a campus-wide, hands-off law. So we found this workaround in order to keep, hopefully, what fans love about that moment without changing too much of Garrett’s character because I just don’t know that he would do that had he been the one to break up with Hannah.

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Swooon: Were there any changes you almost didn’t make or debated making for a while, knowing that book fans are so steadfast about the book?

Levy: I think there’s a lot that we tried to do, and some of it we weren’t able to accomplish. For Season 1, in the writers’ room, we had a bounty board on our whiteboard where we listed a bunch of things in the books that we were trying to put in the show, and we listed very low dollar amounts next to them based on how difficult we thought it would be to get into the show. And some of them we succeeded, and some of them we sadly didn’t. So we might try again in Season 2. We might try again in a future season, or we just kind of let it live in the books. But it really was important to us to do our best and honor the books in every way possible.

Off Campus, Season 1, Streaming Now, Prime Video