Heated Rivalry

 

Link Streaming & Download :

Free : Streaming (Split into parts + Ads). Play Now! Premium : Streaming + Download (full part – premium server – 100% ad-free) : Play & Download Now!

 

Adapting a gay sports romance for television was never really in the cards for Jacob Tierney. But in the summer of 2023, while executive producing The Traitors Canada, the Canadian writer, director, and producer behind the small-town comedy series Letterkenny (and its own hockey-centric spinoff, Shoresy) came across a Washington Post article about the proliferation of hockey romance novels.

Heated Rivalry, the second novel in Canadian author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series about queer hockey players, was specifically mentioned at the end of the WaPo story. “I had this moment where I was like, ‘If someone else options this book, I think I’d go crazy,’” Tierney, who had listened to the series as audiobooks during the pandemic, tells Teen Vogue. With the support of his producing partner Brendan Brady, he quickly reached out to Reid on Instagram to snatch up the rights to develop her book.

Not only did Tierney get his wish, but he has also created a show that will push the boundaries of how queer intimacy, especially between young men, is depicted onscreen. Written and helmed entirely by Tierney, the six-part series — which premieres November 28 on Crave in Canada and on HBO Max in the U.S. and Australia — chronicles the deeply passionate yet clandestine romance between Canadian hockey superstar Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and his fiercest rival, Russian-born Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie).

The story begins in 2009, when six months after facing off in the final of an international junior competition, Rozanov and Hollander are drafted first and second, respectively, to the “Major Hockey League” — the former to Boston, the latter to Montréal. While the press attempts to manufacture a bitter rivalry between them, the two top prospects are unable to resist the magnetic pull between them, beginning a secret fling during their rookie year. For the next eight years, as they chase glory on the ice, Hollander and Rozanov must grapple with their feelings for each other while only being able to meet up a handful of times every season behind closed doors.

From the outset, Tierney was prepared to fight for the show he wanted to make, mainly because he knew there was no real equivalent. “I would vacillate between comparing it to Normal People, Friday Night Lights, and eventually The Hunting Wives,” he says, adding that Heated Rivalry is “gayer than all of them, even Hunting Wives.” After realizing that there was a “really surprising” amount of interest from Canadian TV executives, Tierney wrote a pilot script on spec and then sold the idea to Rachel Goldstein-Couto, the head of development at national streamer Crave.

Goldstein-Couto, in particular, understood the unexpected target audience for gay male romance. “These are books written by women, consumed largely by women,” Tierney says. “I always said, ‘Once you film this, gay men will watch it, but we’ll watch anything with gay men in it. We’re not wildly discerning in that way, and we’re starved for stories. But the secret fan base of this is women, and that is a much bigger target than just queer people or queer men, or whatever the assumption was.’”

Despite reportedly being a billion-dollar industry, the romance genre is still largely underserved in terms of faithful adaptations. “What I said to [Reid] was, ‘I want to take this seriously. I don’t want to dumb this down. I don’t want to condense it,’” Tierney says. That meant making a series rather than a 90-minute, Hallmark-y film that would have inevitably watered down the story. To his surprise, he received little pushback from Crave. “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for them to be like, ‘So I know we said sex, but … does it have to be that long? Does it have to happen in real time?’ And it did. [But] we did not get that note.”

 

 

Casting Heated Rivalry, however, came with its own set of challenges. The creative team needed to find young actors who had the physicality of a hockey player but were also comfortable with nudity and intimacy. “There was a lot of hesitation. A lot of people didn’t want to read for it,” Tierney recalls.

As an actor himself, Tierney knows how stressful — and frankly unfair — it can be to shoot sex scenes without any direction. Speaking with the actors who reached the final round of auditions, he vowed to do everything in his power to make the process as easy as possible. But given that there were three sex scenes in every episode, he needed the actors to be fully cognizant of what the gig required. Tierney told his team to “show them everything,” and asked anyone who was already uncomfortable to take themselves out of the running.

In the end, Tierney knew Williams and Storrie were the right actors to play Hollander and Rozanov when, after agreeing to take on the sexually explicit material, they did a chemistry read together via Zoom. “Connor was just so confident and so funny. He had all the slyness I wanted out of Ilya,” he recalls.“Hudson had all the seriousness I wanted out of Shane. Hudson was also a little more tentative about everything than Connor was.”

When the two co-stars reunited earlier this month on Zoom for their first in-depth interview about Heated Rivalry, Storrie was surprised to learn that the inscrutable way he chose to play Rozanov actually threw Williams off at first.

“I was briefed that [Connor] was American, but as soon as I got in the audition room with him, I thought I was talking with a Slavic Russian boy. I thought his parents must be Russian because everything he was doing was so perfectly Ilya,” Williams tells Teen Vogue, with Storrie giggling in an adjacent screen box. “It was frustrating for me because he was going off-script a little bit. He wasn’t always smiley, and then sometimes, if I really got to him, it would just be like a [slight curve of the lips] — that’s all I got.”

It’s precisely that dynamic — Hollander’s innate earnestness rubbing up against Rozanov’s enigmatic, Eastern European-educated nature — that makes each of their interactions come alive on screen. While Storrie believes that Rozanov is charmed by how “Shane is very easy to read” and “gives everything his 100% openly,” Williams believes that his character is most drawn to how differently Rozanov chooses to live his life.

The foundation of the tension between them lies in Hollander’s deep-seated need for order and structure in his life, which clashes violently with his burgeoning love for Rozanov. “I think [Shane’s sexuality] doesn’t fit his idea of perfection. For Shane, being perfect and being gay — for some reason, those two things don’t fit. So the first time he falls in love is with Ilya, there’s so many things to reconcile that drive him insane,” Williams says.

Rozanov, meanwhile, has a difficult family life that “leaves him feeling very powerless,” and being a renowned hockey player is a way for him to reclaim that, says Storrie. That search for power ultimately extends off the ice and into the bedroom with Hollander. “It’s like, ‘I’m not going to let you know exactly what I’m thinking, because I want to be in power. I’m not going to give you the time of day at first, because I want to be empowered.’”

In the same vein as groundbreaking gay dramas Queer as Folk and Fellow Travelers, Heated Rivalry is largely told, with striking and crucial boldness, through sex. “Because of the way the story is laid out, it takes place over eight years, and these are people who learn about each other through f*cking, so the sex didn’t feel gratuitous,” explains Tierney, who managed to adapt nearly all of the sex scenes from the book. “This is how they communicate: They meet up three times a year and have sex until they hit a point where they’re like, ‘Oh God, we keep doing this. We must have feelings for each other.’”

“When it starts out and it’s sexual, Ilya is comfortable with that. He has no qualms about his sexuality and what that means, which is not the same [as] Shane,” Storrie says of the “dance” between the protagonists as they struggle to label their relationship. “But then when it comes to romance, Shane is pretty emotionally regulated in that sense, even if he’s not very experienced. He’s at least upfront and honest about that, but then that’s when it gets too much for Ilya.”