Ella Bright

In Off Campus (2026) Hannah Wells is the one person in the house who checks the door is locked. Ella Bright plays her guarded, and the guardedness reads as good sense rather than coldness, which is harder than it sounds. Most actors handed a wary character signal it with the shoulders; Bright lets it sit in how long she waits before answering. Her best scenes are the tutoring ones, two people at a kitchen table with a textbook and a running argument, and she is better in them than in anything the series shoots on the ice or in bed.

She has been working since she was a child, and the bulk of that work is Malory Towers (2020–2025), five series and 93 episodes as Darrell Rivers, the quick, independent lead of a CBBC boarding-school adaptation. We have not reviewed it, so we will not judge it at length; what is plain from the outside is that it taught her to carry a show and to play a spirited girl without turning her into a scold. A small part as young Kate Middleton in The Crown (2023) and a first film role in Holmes & Watson (2018) fill out the record. Off Campus is the turn: the first time she has been asked to play an adult, and to play wanting someone.

We were moved, more than we expected to be, in the scene where Hannah tells Garrett about her past, which we will not detail. Bright plays it looking at the table, asking for no tears, and Belmont Cameli's Garrett listens without reaching for her, which is what lets her stillness land. She needs a partner who will not fill the silence, and in Cameli she has one. The series around her is looser than she is. It runs eight episodes where six would do, and the sex, shot at length and with some care, is less charged than the conversations the two of them have fully dressed. That is partly a compliment to her. It is also a limit. She is more persuasive holding back than letting go, and a romance needs both.

She has said of Hannah, "She knows who she is. She’s not defined by her past." That is a fair description of the performance, and the performance is the reason to sit through a series we otherwise found sweet and slack. One adult part is not a career. We would like to see her with a director who takes the silence away from her and makes her talk.