When Off Campus arrived on Prime Video on May 13, the steamy hockey romance pulled off a surprise no one expected. Based on Elle Kennedy's book series of the same name, the romance adaptation's debut season was expected to solely focus on musician Hannah (Ella Bright) and team captain Garrett (Belmont Cameli), the leads of book one, The Deal. However, season 1 sneaks in a secondary couple that quickly stole viewers' hearts: actress Allie (Mika Abdalla) and ladies' man Dean (Stephen Kalyn) from book 3, The Score.
In the week since the show's debut, Dean and Allie have become an iconic couple with a co-sign from genuine rom-com royalty. Now Mika Abdalla, who plays Allie, has viewers around the world wondering who's that girl stealing scenes on TV's biggest romance of 2026 so far. Read on for everything to know about Mika Abdalla, from her child-star roots to her hopes for Allie in Off Campus season 2.
Mika Abdalla is a former teen actress with rom-com experience.
Mika Abdalla was born in Plano, Texas, on May 13, 2000. (In fact, Off Campus debuted on her 26th birthday!) She started as a child model at 6-years-old, before appearing on an episode of Barney & Friends. After appearing in shorts and indie films, she landed her breakout role as a teen spy on the Netflix series Project Mc², earning her a 2016 Young Artist Award nomination.
Since then, Abdalla has mostly held small roles in series like S.W.A.T., The Flash, Suits L.A., and The Pitt (where she shared the screen with her eventual Off Campus co-star Jalen Thomas Brooks!). She also starred in the coming-of-age films Snack Shack and Sex Appeal.
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Mika Abdalla channeled her college days at UCLA while filming 'Off Campus.'
As a young star preparing to transition to adulthood, Abdalla decided to take a hiatus from her career. She enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017, after graduating from high school a year early. In a Her Campus interview, Adballa explained that she "dabbled in being a kid" during her time at school.
"I had five roommates in my dorm at UCLA," she recalled of her early college days. "I went to a big UCLA-USC game [and] I got punched by a very drunk USC sorority girl. We were walking towards the stadium. She saw me, and she did not like the UCLA of it all. And she gave me a good, solid punch in the arm. So that was fun!"
Though Abdalla returned to working after the pandemic, she eventually graduated with a degree in philosophy and film, seven years after enrolling. Speaking to Her Campus, she credited it to the discipline she learned in her childhood days in equestrian sports. "I wanted to get [my] degree to honor that part of my life," she said.
Mika Abdalla was previously engaged to a fellow child actor.
Like Allie, Abdalla is entering her single-girl era after a long-term relationship. Three weeks after Off Campus's premiere, US Weekly revealed that the actress had split from her fiancé Jake Short after five years of dating.
"Due to recent interest in Mika’s personal life it would feel remiss to not address that her and Jake are no longer together," a rep for Abdalla told the outlet. "They continue to support each other and remain on friendly terms, and kindly ask for privacy and respect."
Abdalla and Short—a former child actor best known for a ubiquitous meme—first met as co-stars on Hulu's 2022 teen comedy Sex Appeal, where they played childhood besties who enter a friends-with-benefits/sexual-discovery situation. (Of course, Short's character is secretly in love with Adballa's the whole time.) The pair got engaged in May 2025, according to an Instagram tribute.
Mika Abdalla inspired Allie's onscreen look before she even auditioned.
Abdalla has been vocal about her deep connection to her character, and it turns out there was a bit of fate behind her casting as Allie. The actress initially auditioned for the role of Hannah, though she admitted to Her Campus that she "would not consider myself a singer or a musician." But even before Abdalla landed the audition, series creator Louisa Levy had already connected her to Allie.
Levy revealed to Her Campus that she and her co-showrunner, Gina Fattore, had unknowingly included Abdalla in their pitch for Off Campus, on a mood board evoking Allie's energy. "I found Mika and a lot of her photos in Snack Shack, and her Instagram page…she just felt like Allie to me," Levy told the outlet. And so we have this fake Instagram profile for Allie that is Mika, and it was well before she ever came to audition."
Abdalla elaborated on her connection to Allie in an interview with Numero Netherlands. "I see a lot of myself in Allie, but simultaneously, she is nothing like me. Her energy is at a pretty consistent 10/10. I like to say she’s me when I’m having the best day ever. I was really excited to explore a part of myself that doesn’t always show."
Mika Abdalla knew that her J.Lo-approved jungle dress would be a hit.
One of the buzziest scenes of Off Campus season 1 is Allie and Dean's meet-cute, which takes place on the dance floor of a costume party. For the scene, Abdalla wears a recreation of Jennifer Lopez's iconic Versace jungle dress from the 2000 Grammys. The moment was such a hit that it even made it to J.Lo's timeline; the multi-hyphenate reshared the clip on X/Twitter, adding the note, "love this shooooww."
Speaking to PEOPLE, Abdalla recalled her intuition that the scene would be a hit. "I had a feeling, especially because it happened so early on," she told the outlet. "When we were getting close to the dress being finished, and I saw what it was going to [look like], when we were shooting it, I was like, 'Huh, I think people are going to like this.'"
Abdalla also told Betches UK about the work it took to feel secure in the dress that inspired Google Images. "It was unreal. [The dress] was built from scratch," she said. "My first fitting was like, put on this nude leotard and we're going to cut it up and pin all this shit to you. It was five fittings. It was insane, I was so taped in. I was ready to dance the night away."
Mika Abdalla is excited to portray "deep emotional turmoil" Allie will go through in 'Off Campus' season 2.
In an interview with PEOPLE, Abdalla opened up about her hopes for Allie in the show's already-confirmed second season. Though she hinted that she's "not excited" about the challenges Allie will have to face in the future—which book readers will be well aware of—Abdalla is prepared to stretch her acting muscles.
"I am excited about it as an actor," she said. "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."
She added, "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. I'm excited to do the puzzle of Allie."
