‘Off Campus’ Star Jalen Thomas Brooks On Tucker & ‘The Pitt’ Season 3

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus book series.

For The Pitt breakout Jalen Thomas Brooks, the medical show provided a springboard to his latest big gig, the role of John Tucker in Prime Video‘s Off Campus.

Director Silver Tree, who helmed an episode of Season 1 of HBO’s Emmy-winning drama starring Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa and many more, also directed the first two episodes of Off Campus, which caught Brooks’ attention when he saw her name on the audition notice.

“I read the Tucker description and how he was a peacemaker, cook, the younger brother energy of the group and the glue guy,” Brooks told Deadline via phone call. “There was a lot of things that I connected to personally in my life, just how I am in my friend groups, and I grew up playing a lot of competitive basketball. I was always the youngest and the younger brother of all my sports teams So playing a character in a different sport under a Booktok IP was a mesh of all these worlds that I thought would be fun to dive into.”

Hockey training for the character, who plays a forward on the Briar U Hawks’ starting squad that includes Season 1 lead Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli) and future star teammates John Logan (Antonio Cipriano) and Dean Di Laurentis (Stephen Kalyn), involved working with stunt double Tristan Craighead to coordinate movement on the ice and learning the fundamentals to make transitions between the actors and their athletic counterparts look more fluid.

In Elle Kennedy’s book series of the same name, Tucker’s love story comes fourth. Brooks sees the romance with pre-law student, Sabrina, as “worth the wait” for many reasons.

“You spend so much time with these characters, getting to know them and this newfound family. When we get to that season of Tucker, it’s not just an encapsulation of a family that’s starting. It’s a family that’s been there and between the boys and the friends,” he said. “Of course, what Tucker’s story consists of is going to be the total bookend, and it’s going to hold the weight of not just Tucker and Sabrina, but all the three relationships that came prior. I think it’s worth the wait in the sense of, it’s going to have a massive payoff for everybody. And it just happens to be funneled through Tucker and Sabrina.”

RELATED: ‘Off Campus’ Stars Ella Bright & Belmont Cameli Talk Lighthearted, Serious And Musical “Moments Of Connection” For Hannah & Garrett In Season 1

In the below interview, Brooks unpacks some show-specific details for his character, his approach to Tucker’s love story, how his character’s fate was almost very different in the books and what is in store for Season 3 of The Pitt.

DEADLINE: How did you connect to Tucker for this show?

JALEN THOMAS BROOKS: I would say his motherly instincts, wanting to take care of everybody, cook everybody food, especially, in this adaptation, of being the youngest in a sports team. And also just trying to show yourself while you’re doing all that, but primarily his motherly instincts and wanting to take care of everybody around him.

DEADLINE: What is Tucker and Logan’s paired costume supposed to be at Dean and Beau’s twofer birthday?

BROOKS: That’s funny.So I’m a bumblebee, and then Logan’s a hawk or a bird. So the whole play on words was the birds and the bees,which is kind of correlated to both John Logan and John Tucker’s stories, in a sense.

Specifically John Tucker’s. There’s a lot of foreshadowing going on in that episode that people will probably pick apart when it comes out. It’s even more so for John Tucker as well.

DEADLINE: I have to ask about the fruit hazing that Tucker goes through.

BROOKS: That’s a crazy sentence, huh? Oh, man, it was funny. Even the whole crew was in on the bit. They were taking the props that I had, and they would give me actual fruit. There was a lot of bits that actually didn’t make it into the episode because the bit was out of control and going so long that there was a scene that got cut short where Khobe and Stephen, Dean and Beau are showing the telling me what’s about to happen, and then he eats my strawberry and replaces it with a kiwi.

What happened with that scene originally, when I started backing up into the corner, there was a whole chase sequence that happened around the house, and I ran and slid underneath Khobe’s legs, jumped over Dean, and then he caught me in the air, held me and took the kiwi and ate it. It was such a fun time. It was such a bit, and eventually, when we were playing with Bernardo on the ice, we actually played hockey with a banana. So there’s a lot of fun BTS that we have on our phones that is going to be on the post-premiere dump.

DEADLINE: For your karaoke scene, was it always that song? Did you have any other songs in mind? I feel like it captures Tucker pretty well.

BROOKS: [Showrunner] Louisa [Levy] was between Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” and “Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)” but given Tucker and given the show, “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” just makes sense.And why not? It was fun to do.

It was so funny when after we wrapped filming, I would go out to bars with friends and they start playing that song, and I would be like, I can’t, nobody knows how much this song means to me because [the show] hasn’t come out yet.

DEADLINE: The Thanksgiving episode is a stressful one for Tucker. Do you think he still feels seen while he’s taking care of others?

BROOKS: I think he does it in order to be seen. He comes from a single mother. Showing his care and is a way of having I think his fellow friends validate him. It’s like “I’m there for you. I care for you.” So when Dean leaves and Garrett leaves, and then Logan stays [fist bumps Antonio Cipriano as they both say “John John”], it’s his way of feeling seen, taking care of others, and he puts people before himself. It’s one of the things that he wants to do more of.

DEADLINE: Tucker and Logan are house mom and house dad for the team. We haven’t seen much of their love lives, but they seem to kind of balance out Garrett and Dean, who are a little more crazy and hooking up with a bunch of girls. What was it like achieving that dynamic in Season 1?

BROOKS: There’s a beauty about the show that the spotlights on one person, but then being in the background, you see characters developing, and of course, reacting to the world that’s being laid out in front of them. For Tucker, specifically, it’s fun to play a character that isn’t so much all bats up front and nobody really knows what he’s doing behind [the scenes] and in the background and in his relationship life, and when he meets certain people or when things are going to be called back to.

The balancing of it as an actor was fun to not have a big pressure of having to create something, but then learn from Belmont and Stephen of how they were doing it and how the stories are laid off for them, and even so Antonio for Logan. It’s a cool thing as an actor to be able to have that privilege of working and to sit back and learn and take notes. So I really enjoyed it.

DEADLINE: With hockey being known sometimes for its locker room talk and toxic masculinity culture, how did you find the balance of that versus playing a lead romance character?

BROOKS: It’s a whole female creative team. So it’s from the gaze of the woman’s perspective, which is really lovely, especially the contents that we have on script. Even in locker room talk, they left it up to us to explore that dynamic through a very, controlled gaze with all female directors.

DEADLINE: What are you looking forward to for season two? I know you probably can’t say much.

BROOKS: I’ll try to give you a good answer, but not spoil anything. I’m looking forward to, of course, seeing Tucker even grow up even more and have more of a more of a story, and as we get to know Tucker even more. I’m also really excited to see a lot more hockey, and you’re gonna get a lot of the boys together.

DEADLINE: What are you most looking forward to for when your season hopefully rolls around?

BROOKS: The dynamic clash of how my love interest is, it’s two different energies coming together. Not stereotypes, but tropes flipped on their head, and the sense of where positions and relationships lie, and then how characters just fall beautifully into that and adjust to that, especially Tucker, is gonna be fun to explore.

DEADLINE: Tucker’s story involves a pregnancy. How are you looking ahead to that and preparing for it?

BROOKS: I have a soft spot in my heart for stories that deal with young kids, or newfound fathers, a father who stepped up. Those dynamics have such a wide variety of messages and meanings and lessons to have. But, in regards to our show, when we cross that bridge, I think it’s going to encapsulate all the messages, the story of the messages the story has brought forward up to that point. And I’m looking forward to it and preparing for that is building. Tucker is the point of, he’s not going to know the type of man he is until he gets to that point.

In the book, Tucker is this gentle giant, and he’s this kind of mentor and the legit mother of the group. And Tucker in the show is becoming that It’s really beautiful, I think it’s gonna be the making of this young man and the people in his life, and not just himself stepping up, but probably this whole group of friends. It takes a village to raise a child and to support somebody, and that’s the same thing for a teen, for a friend group. It takes a village, it is a village.

DEADLINE: Author Elle Kennedy mentioned that she almost had Tucker be the death that really affected Dean in The Score. If you knew about that, what are your thoughts on that concept and why we still need him in the series and his story?

BROOKS: I actually had heard about that through Tiktok while I was shooting, and we all talked about it on set, and we were all like, “Whoa, could you imagine?” Obviously, Tucker being the how he is in the book. I mean, that would be absolutely devastating. But for the grief for Dean’s character, any death close to Dean, as in, Tucker or Beau, is going to have a huge effect. I’m grateful it’s not Tucker, in a sense, because I could stick around and hang with the boys as things go on and develop.

But I remember hearing that, and it’s one of the beautiful things about, when you have dynamic characters and characters that audiences really care about, of how it can be either or when it comes to a writer. And it’s fascinating from Elle Kennedy’s perspective of the reasons why she decided to and not to. But we were all made aware at the same time while we were filming, through Tiktok, that it was supposed to be Tucker. So if in the show, and in the book, if that was the case, I think it would have probably shook a lot of people.

DEADLINE: You mentioned Booktok and sub genres. I’m curious if you have any books that you would like to see come to screen, or any other roles you’re looking to get, or who you would want to see portrayed?

BROOKS: I got into acting because of The Hunger Games so I’m always a fan of any Hunger Games adaptation in any new Hunger Games book. I’m a big C.S. Lewis fan, and one of my dream roles is to do, I’m a big Ben Barnes fan, so playing Prince Caspian would be amazing, one of my dreams. I’m a big Game of Thrones guy. I grew up on Narnia. I’ve always been obsessed with fantasy and medieval times. So, Prince Caspian would be amazing, or even his son in the later books.

I read a lot of books. I’m an avid reader, so an adaptation I really want to see is a lot of James Baldwin’s work: Giovanni’s Room and Go Tell On the Mountain. He did If Beale Street Could Talk, which is a phenomenal movie that Barry Jenkins did, but yeah, I’m a huge book nerd, so I could ramble about that for hours.

DEADLINE: What do you think is in store for Mateo in season three of The Pitt? Could we expect him back on the day shift?

BROOKS: Those writers are some of the most talented people in the world. Every single time I would hear a little snippet of an idea, when I was on set, I was like, “That’s insane.” They’re just going to keep one-upping everything.And I think the stories are going to be, not what people expect. For Mateo, I have heard, but it’s still in the sense of, if I get called in to clock in, I will be there. If my pager goes off, I will be in the ER.

DEADLINE Is there any hope for him and Javadi?

BROOKS: In my mind, as Mateo and as myself, Jalen, I would say, of course, there’s always hope.

DEADLINE: Is there any medical issue you would want to see covered in season three?

BROOKS: Oh, man. Oh, shoot. I don’t know. There’s so many that they do. I nerd out, because I was able to watch The Pitt Season Two as a fan because I didn’t what was happening prior to going in. I would say I would love to see some brain surgery, something in the brain.

I would also say dislocated joints, you know, like in the first season when they did the Captain Morgan stand of putting the hip back in place. I want a lot more of that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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