Before a Single Scene Was Filmed, Fans Were Already Stopping Matt Cornett on the Street for ‘Every Year After’

Matt Cornett knew that Every Year After had a passionate fanbase waiting for it. But nothing prepared him for the moment a group of strangers stopped him on a sidewalk — before the show had even started filming properly — to tell him exactly how much Carley Fortune’s books had meant to them.

Speaking with Who What Wear, Cornett, 27, described two moments that made him genuinely understand the scale of what Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of Fortune’s bestselling novel Every Summer After was going to mean to audiences. The first came with the casting announcement itself — watching the online reaction and seeing how much excitement there was around whether the cast would do justice to the characters readers had already built strong connections with.

The second moment hit harder, and more personally.

Cornett was having lunch with co-star Joseph Chiu, who plays Jordie in the series, and the two were walking back to their places when a group of people suddenly approached them in a state of visible excitement. The show hadn’t aired. Production had barely begun. The only thing that had been made public was that they had been cast.

The group recognized them purely from the casting announcement photos — and immediately launched into how much they loved the books and how invested they already were in seeing the adaptation done right. For Cornett, it was the clearest possible signal that Every Year After wasn’t just another streaming series. It had an existing audience that was deeply, personally attached to the source material and was watching closely.

Cornett plays Sam Florek in the series — Percy Fraser’s childhood best friend and first love, a cardiologist in his adult years whose path crosses back with Percy’s after a tragedy brings them home to the lakeside town of Barry’s Bay, British Columbia. The show spans six summers across the characters’ lives, requiring Cornett to portray Sam at both 16 and 28 — a dual-age challenge he described as strange but exciting when he first read the character breakdown.

He received the original audition under a fake title, knowing only that it was a romance show for Amazon with a leading male role. After months of silence following the initial audition, he was brought in to meet the team and given more specifics. He described the role as arriving at exactly the right moment in his career — something more adult and creatively stretching than what he had tackled before.

Cornett previously made his name at Disney with a lead role in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series alongside Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett, and also appeared in Zombies 3. Every Year After marks his arrival as a full-fledged leading man in a major streaming drama.

Every Year After premiered at the Tribeca Festival on June 8, 2026, and is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The series has already been renewed for a second season, which will draw from Fortune’s sequel novel One Golden Summer.