Abdalla tells PEOPLE what's next for Allie — and Dean (Stephen Kalyn)! — after that major twist in the season 1 finale of the steamy new Prime Video series
Credit: Liane Hentscher / Prime
Warning: This story contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of Off Campus.
NEED TO KNOW
- Season 1 of Off Campus leaves off with a major cliffhanger involving Allie (Mika Abdalla) and Dean (Stephen Kalyn)
- Abdalla breaks down what’s to come for Allie after that twist and teases season 2 as she reveals she’s received the first two scripts: “It’s all very real”
- Off Campus is now streaming on Prime Video
There's a bit of a mess on Allie Hayes's hands at the end of Off Campus season 1.
After getting involved with Dean (Stephen Kalyn) — Allie and Dean are the subject of the third book in Elle Kennedy's series, The Score, and season 1 of the Prime Video show adapted the first book, The Deal — after her breakup with Sean (Riley Davis), Allie started to panic about falling back into old patterns. In the hopes of slowing things down between her and Dean, she suggested they both sleep with other people, and then she slept with the mysterious Carter St. James (Charlie Evans), whom she'd previously kissed, after running into him on campus.
In the final moments of season 1, Carter walked into Malone's and a nightmare unfolded for Allie. Dean put the pieces together that she had slept with Carter, just after he revealed that he didn't want to see other people, and Carter St. James's true identity was revealed: he's actually Hunter Davenport, the protagonist of Kennedy's The Play, a book in her Off Campus spinoff series, Briar U.
"We were all surprised by it," Mika Abdalla, who plays Allie, tells PEOPLE of the twist. "I think it's really great. "It's really fun to throw someone else into the mix for Allie, just fresh out of her relationship, freaking out about this relationship [with Dean]."
"It's nice to pump the brakes a little bit," Abdalla, 26, says. "I'm excited to see what goes on from there, because that's a pretty heated way to end the season."
Credit: Amazon Prime Video
She reveals the season was originally "supposed to end differently, and then we had to change that, for reasons that will be revealed later," and the Hunter twist was instead introduced.
Hunter's arrival in the series was "like the freaking nuclear codes," Abdalla says. "We needed to not talk about that. No one was allowed to know who that man was, which was hilarious." The cast was explicitly told not to "follow" Evans on social media or otherwise engage with him to avoid spoiling his arrival. "We weren't allowed to do a freaking thing with that man. They kept it locked up."
Showrunner Louisa Levy tells PEOPLE that the decision to bring Hunter into the fold "allowed us to tee up potential future seasons that we might be able to explore, and also tee up a little bit of Dean's backstory that we might be able to get into in future seasons as well."
As she points out, Hunter is a character that appears in The Score, Dean and Allie's book, "just in a small way," so she and the writers found it a "fun opportunity" to "pull from the later books and use those characters to build out" the world on the college campus. "I have no idea how fans are going to react to it, but I'm very excited to see."
Credit: Liane Hentscher / Prime
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Off Campus was renewed for season 2 before season 1 premiered, but Prime Video has not yet confirmed which couple it'll follow. On her character's behalf, Abdalla says she is "not excited" about the next installment, as she anticipates some major challenges for Allie. "I am excited about it as an actor," she says. "I am excited for the deep emotional turmoil that Allie is going through, because I think that'll be a lot of fun [to play], and that's not really something I got to play around with too, too much this season."
"I am excited to see the inner workings of her. It's really fun to play such a vibrant, larger-than-life character, who also has these extremely deep feelings about herself and the world around her. It's such a balance," Abdalla continues. "I'm excited to do the puzzle of Allie."
Abdalla has received scripts for the first two episodes of season 2, she confirms, which is "very exciting," and the cast returns to Vancouver to start filming shortly. "It's all very real," she says of the next installment.
Off Campus season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.
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