No big names. No big budget. But Heated Rivalry is a big hit
A few months ago Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams were both working as waiters. Now they are the stars of Heated Rivalry, one of the most talked about shows in the world.
Adapted from a novel by Canadian author Rachel Reid, who writes “sexually explicit queer romance novels about hockey players”, Heated Rivalry chronicles a forbidden love affair between two rival ice hockey players.
The show was not an obvious a runaway hit. It was created and produced in Canada on a minimal budget – reportedly less than C$5m ($3.6m; £2.6m) per episode. Its six episodes were filmed in Ontario in just over a month, with a cast lead mostly by unknowns.
But since its debut in North America last November, Storrie, who plays Russian player Ilya Rozanov, and Williams, who plays Canadian Shane Hollander, have wracked up millions of fans, acted as torchbearers ahead of the Milan winter Olympics and appeared on a host of late night TV shows.
Storrie is set to host Saturday Night Live at the end of this month, while Williams – who reportedly still lives with his mum in Vancouver – recently shared a stage with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at an Ottawa film industry event.
“I was just talking with one of my agents yesterday, and she said Connor and I have had to learn what a lot of actors get in five years, in like 30 days,” Williams, who plays Hollander, told the Shut Up Evan podcast last month.
But its explosion into the zeitgeist since its debut last November has propelled its cast – and the people behind the scenes – into the stratosphere. Its penultimate episode has broken records to tie with Breaking Bad for the highest-rated episode ever on entertainment website IMDB. Now streaming in the UK and across the globe, the show’s runaway success has the potential to reshape the television landscape.
“We feel like proud mommas,” says Jenny Lewis, one of the casting directors who found Storrie and Williams.
Working alongside her co-casting director Sara Kay, she tells the BBC they had “just three months” to find their stars, with the added complication of a very detailed checklist.
“There were all these stipulations – [comfortable with] sexual content, [doing] accents or other languages, skating, [being] good looking, athletic,” Lewis says.
The show’s producer Jacob Tierney told Toronto-based Kay and Lewis that he wanted the characters to remain faithful to the original source material, which had a passionate fan base.
“It was a tall order and a lot of agents might have been scared off quickly, and I think in terms of Connor and Hudson, they were clearly people who were willing to go for it and embrace every part of what the show was about,” Kay adds.
Kay says herself and Lewis are “somewhat surprised” by the way the show’s leads have been received by the public, adding: “I don’t think anyone could have predicted this level of anarchy of like pop star excitement from people in the world”.
‘We don’t care how many Instagram followers someone has’
Tierney, along with fellow show producer Brendan Brady, have spoken since the show’s release about the pressure they felt to make significant changes to the sex-heavy LGBT romance in order to get financial backing.
But Canadian streamer Crave, who had worked with Tierney before on shows like Letterkenny and Shoresy, greenlit Heated Rivalry and allowed them to maintain creative control. That helped get the books’ ardent fanbase on board, which in turn built momentum, says Myles McNutt, an associate professor of media studies at Old Dominion University.
“What Tierney wanted to do was an incredibly faithful adaptation of this novel, wildly faithful – faithful to a degree I don’t think anybody ever imagined,” he says.
Crave tapped into this fan base to help promote the show – and secure international distribution. Anne Rohweder, who runs a Heated Rivalry Scrapbook fansite, says fans of the books were even asked to be a part of the show’s early promotional materials.
“It looks like they were really interested in us,” she says. “They were actually paying attention.”
As the trailer spread far and wide, international fans of the series lobbied for other streaming networks to pick it up. Buoyed by their enthusiasm, HBO Max decided to distribute it in the US and Australia. Sky brought it to the UK and Ireland last month and it is still rolling out across the rest of Europe.
“The trailer was clearly spreading beyond Canadian borders, doing numbers far beyond other content on those platforms,” McNutt says of the initial hype. “I have to think that all of that made some impact.”
The show is the complete antithesis to what is happening in the rest of the streaming world, where Hollywood’s biggest actors are regularly cast in high-budget productions designed for the small screen.
Lewis and Kay hope they’ve set a new precedent when it comes to giving unknown actors a chance.
“We don’t care how many Instagram followers someone has or whether they can make a TikTok here in Canada,” Kay says.
“We’re not looking to discover the next star, but we’re just looking for the best actors.
“When you do that you can find people who you would never expect who can then be propelled into stardom,” she adds.
‘Its like a dopamine kind of rollercoaster’
The show has transformed the lives of many involved with its production, including musician Peter Jones, a solo artist who accepted the offer to score Heated Rivalry as “a break” from his usual work.
The composer’s ambient, sonic landscape score has been praised highly, with Jones describing the reaction as a “dopamine kind of rollercoaster”.
Jones, who goes by the stage name Peter Peter, tells the BBC that “music is part of the string that makes people emotional” about the series and he has received hundreds of messages begging him to release the score.
“I can’t imagine what it is to be Jacob [Tierney] or the actors right now, but for the music, it’s still manageable.
“It’s the first time in my life that I experienced such a thing,” he adds.
Life has also changed drastically for author Rachel Reid, who recently told the BBC she thought her books were “unadaptable”.
Her audiobook catalogue has seen a 1,500% global increase in listening since the show’s debut according to Spotify, whilst her publisher HarperCollins said on Thursday her collection of hockey-based queer love stories have enjoyed “stunning sales”. Seven years after its original publication, the original novel became a New York Times bestseller.
Whilst Lewis says they haven’t been briefed yet on who to cast for series two, which was quickly commissioned after the show’s overnight success, she says they’re hoping to get more information later this month and will “put the priority into Canadian talent”.
“It speaks to some of the creative freedom that we get to have in [Canada], in these smaller climates where our budgets aren’t as big and actors are in it for the material,” Lewis adds.
Many fans of the show hope that its second series recreates the magic of the first.
Writer and critic Caroline Siede, whose recent character breakdown on the show went viral, also hopes it won’t fall victim to bigger streamer’s demands.
“This show breaks all the expected rules – you hear about Netflix demanding expository dialogue so that if somebody’s watching on their phone, they can follow the story without really paying attention,” she tells the BBC.
“You cannot enjoy the show and scroll TikTok at the same time, you really need to lock in,” Siede says, “because so much of the work is in the glances, the unsaid things – not to mention how much of it is in Russian”.
