From his home in Laurel Canyon, Belmont Cameli sits relaxed on my screen, in front of a wall of vintage records and a drum set; a glimpse into the life of the young actor. With the windows wide open and an immediate ease to his demeanor, Cameli wastes no time filling me in on what led up to this beautiful SoCal afternoon. The 27-year-old actor wasn’t always in pursuit of the screen: he grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Naperville, where he played three sports and after graduating high school, attended University of Illinois as a business major. It’s strange to imagine Cameli confined to a classroom—and deep down, he knew that too. “I did [business] for one year before leaving college and deciding that I wanted to be an actor and a filmmaker.” 

When he told his family he was dropping out, “the initial reaction amongst everybody was: ‘You’re nuts,’” he says with humor. But his call to storytelling was too big to fit in a conference room, so despite his childhood taking place on the field, he followed his intuition to the arts. “My mom wanted me to have a plan B and it took a lot of chipping away to explain that if I have a plan B, I’ll fall back on plan B.” After dropping out, he moved to Chicago and stayed afloat with modeling jobs. He eventually moved to LA in 2019, but he didn’t leave without a souvenir. On his last day in academia he attended orientation and went to get his ID photo taken. “One of my friends had this clothing brand called Awful Cloth, so the sweatshirt I was wearing said ‘awful’ on it,” he says. When they printed my ID out it said student right under my picture. So it just said ‘awful student.’” He ditched the second half of the day and never looked back. 

To Cameli, there is no better education than the one you get on set. “Saved by the Bell was my first big job, and Universal lot is really where I got to cut my teeth as an actor; that was a real education for me,” he remembers fondly. In the beginning, he was doing comedy and romance, but recently he’s adopted more serious roles—and the hands-on education Cameli sought after doesn’t get much better than learning from Robert De Niro. 

Cameli gushes over his role in Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights, “That was crazy, I grew up a huge fan of Robert De Niro. When I was a kid, and still to this day, when people ask me what my favorite movie is I tell them, A Bronx Tale. It was the first film De Niro directed and he cast Katherine Narducci to play his wife.” 

It wasn’t just De Niro and Narducci on the set of The Alto Knights, but director Barry Levinson who also made a real impact on Cameli. “Barry’s extremely seasoned, as seasoned as it gets, and he allows for a lot of dramatic improv. The page is merely a suggestion, and I learned that very quickly on day one.” He also learned what happens when Robert De Niro makes an impromptu speech during filming: “Take one, he picks up a glass of champagne and makes a lengthy speech that was not written and we all cheers our glasses. Barry calls cut and I’m like, ‘Shit, I had a line in there. Should I say something?’ But immediately after, the other voice in my head said, ‘Absolutely not, when Robert De Niro makes a speech, you toast him and you just listen.’” 

Even through a screen, Cameli’s gravitation towards storytelling is crystal clear. He can easily define moments that shaped his artistry. After The Alto Knights, he joined the Cast of Until Dawn, where a group of friends gets stuck in a horrific time loop. Racing the clock, the group faces brutal violence and must survive until dawn. The script came across his desk late in the casting process but when he read it and saw that David F. Sandberg was set to direct, he was on a plane to Budapest within a few days.

“It was my first time shooting in Europe and I’ll never forget getting off the flight and having one of the guys from production pick me up at the airport with a Manila folder and a script inside.” I can tell the memory is crystal clear, as if it were a picture. “I’ll never forget that moment, it felt like I’ve been waiting for this for a really long time.” The experience that followed was uniquely impactful: “More than anything it was so much fun to shoot this movie. There’s this huge tunnel system under the city that they originally built for beer refrigeration and we were down there.” The film was also shot practically, so all the gory details are real for the cast, “It’s long hours, it’s your heart beating through your chest all day, fight or flight constantly.” 

The relationship between the cast, which included Ella Rubin, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, and Maia Mitchell, made the unwinding process easier. “We watched the sun come up together probably 40 times, all on location in some really beautiful places in Budapest. We were such good friends and I think that really got us through [those] long days.” But the long nights lent themselves to the character, “Part of the film is that we are decaying over time, so I used the landscape of the stress and difficulty of making a horror film to lend itself to that decay. Sometimes I’d get to work and sit in the chair and my makeup artist, Talli Patcher, would be like, ‘You good?’ and I just looked like hell.’” 

A huge inspiration for Cameli is his family. Whether it’s supporting him through his transition to the arts or his older brother who he accredits his entire music taste to, he consistently returns to his family. Notably, it was his late father who instilled the drive that led to his growing success, “He would always tell me that if you set your mind to it, you can do it, and he really believed in me in that way.” He had to carry that with him when he left school and follow through on his pursuits. “I care deeply about what I do and I love doing it so much I would do it for free, I would do it everyday if I was so lucky.” 

Photographed by Sam Ramirez

Styled by Sydney Lopez at The Wall Group

Written by Kayla Hardy

Grooming: Christine Nelli at Forward Artists

Photo Assistant: Andrzej Lawnik

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