Naperville’s Belmont Cameli stars on new ‘Saved by the Bell,’ still on the football team
Belmont Cameli played football at Naperville North High School, and now he plays the captain of the Bayside High School football team on the new “Saved by the Bell” reboot. But Cameli said he doesn’t have much in common with his character, Jamie Spano, who is described as a “sensitive man-child.”
Viewers meet Jamie as he prepares for his geography test by studying his textbook upside down. “I’m reading about Australia,” he quips. Jamie is popular, but easily duped. Cameli said he fared better at Naperville North — at least on his report card.
“I was a wide receiver. Jamie plays quarterback, but he’s pretty lackluster,” Cameli, 22, told the Tribune. “I was also kind of a lousy quarterback. They would let me play JV on Saturday mornings, and my big claim to fame was that I threw a touchdown on accident. I missed the receiver I was aiming for so bad that I hit another one, but we still scored. That was kind of cool. But I think the similarities end there. Jamie is not a super-involved academic, and I took my studies pretty seriously.”
Jamie is the son of Jessie Spano, a Bayside overachiever who now works at the California school as a counselor. Elizabeth Berkley Lauren reprises her “Saved by the Bell” role, one of many ties between the original series, which aired from 1989 to 1992, and the reboot, which is scheduled to drop Wednesday on the Peacock streaming service.
The original “Saved by the Bell” followed Spano and the high jinks of classmates Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar); Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani Thiessen); A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez); Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies) and Screech Powers (Dustin Diamond). Zack and Kelly wed after high school, and somehow, Zack has been elected governor of California for the reboot. He draws heat for closing underfunded schools, so he has the affected students sent to better schools, including Bayside.
The first few episodes of the reboot explore how these new kids settle into life at Bayside, which has the latest technology, fancy dances and privileged kids like Zack’s son, Mac (Mitchell Hoog), and Jamie Spano. Lopez is back as Slater, who has graduated from Bayside football star to coach for the reboot. Cameli said he drew inspiration from the Slater character, as well as his time as a Naperville North athlete.
Cameli — who is named for his great-grandfather, not Belmont Avenue in Chicago — also played volleyball and wrestled for the school. He said after graduating in 2016, he briefly attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He quickly realized he didn’t want to continue his finance studies, so he got into modeling and acting. He appeared in some student films and a 2018 episode of “Empire” as “cute guy.” The “Saved by the Bell” reboot will be his major television debut.
Cameli said he didn’t watch the original series as a kid, but binged it for the audition. He said the reboot will appeal to Millennials who grew up with “Saved by the Bell” and a new generation of teens.
“I think that crowd that grew up loving it and watching it will really appreciate it because there are a lot of those Easter eggs, and the new show pays homage to the original very often and in very funny ways,” Cameli said. “The new show is very self-aware, which I think makes it even funnier, and I do think it will attract another new young audience like the original show did.”
Cameli said he has been splitting time between the Chicago area and Los Angeles and hopes to audition more in the new year. In the meantime, Naperville North football coach Sean Drendel is looking forward to seeing Cameli hit the football field again — on TV.
“He was just a hardworking kid,” Drendel said about Cameli. “Because he played three sports, it was tough to be excellent and a superstar at any of them, but he was very good at all three and was well respected. That’s not an easy task for a kid in high school nowadays.”
tswartz@tribpub.com
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