Trust the algorithm. I had yet to even watch the pilot of Heated Rivalry—the “gay hockey smut” that took the Internet by storm this winter—when I began to encounter clips online: fan edits set to Nelly Furtado, Beyoncé, Troye Sivan; front-facing videos of viewers parsing the subtext of certain scenes; and charming interviews of the show’s chummy co-stars, actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie.
On screen, they play Shane Hollander (Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Storrie)—professional hockey players whose years-long rivalry on the ice is complicated by their clandestine affair. The tension between them erupts, often several times per episode, in stairwells, bathrooms, and on rooftops—wherever and whenever they can steal a moment alone. In scarcely more than two months since it premiered—on the Canadian streaming service Crave in late November and on HBO Max, where it was snatched up for U.S. distribution—the show has enjoyed the kind of ravenous word-of-mouth campaign that no marketing budget can buy, catapulting the actors into sudden fame and proving the Internet’s power to mint new celebrities overnight.
For 25-year-old Storrie, who was working 40 hours a week as a server in Los Angeles before booking Heated Rivalry, the past few weeks have been “surreal.” In a congested media landscape, there was no reason to think that an MM romance, based on a steamy novel of the same name by Rachel Reid, produced for a non-American streamer would break through back home. “The more that I get recognized, the more that people stop me and know me by name,” Storrie tells me over Zoom, “the more I’m like, Okay, this is actually something.”
Something, indeed. It would be impossible to distill the exact formula of Heated Rivalry’s improbable success, though industry execs will inevitably try. It’s a gay show that speaks equally to young women—a romantic fantasy of bulging pecs and stolen glances and lubeless anal sex that nonetheless captures, with startling clarity, the intoxication and breathless panic of first love.
While the sex appeal is crucial, part of the show’s genius also stems from form. These episodes are packed with montage, quick cuts between Rozanov and Hollander (as they call each other, even in intimate moments) on ice and in bed, set to the propulsive beat of bangers like Feist’s “My Moon My Man” or t.A.T.u’s “All The Things She Said.” We jump through time and space, from ice rink to hotel bed, from lamplit room to lamplit room—pump, thrust, shoot, score.
“The more that I get recognized, the more that people stop me and know me by name, the more I’m like, Okay, this is actually something.”
These cinematic flourishes are grounded, however, in the palpable chemistry of the pair onscreen. Storrie recalls the first time they met, in an audition over Zoom. “I remember being like, ‘This is going to be good,’” he recalls, noting that Jacob Tierney, the show’s creator, left the pair alone on the call. “He was like, ‘Alright, guys, whenever you’re ready.’ And then clicked off his screen. Hudson and I looked at each other for like five seconds and had this moment of taking each other in.”
As interviews began to trickle in, many fans were shocked to learn how much Storrie differs from his character, a brooding Russian bad-boy who’s all cigarettes and smolder. As a child in Odessa, Texas, Storrie took an early interest in acting, watching The Wizard of Oz “at the littlest of ages” and thinking, “I want to do that.” He has a taste for horror—the dark, the uncanny—and he cites Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as formative influences.
After moving to LA to pursue acting as a teen, Storrie grappled with an age-old predicament. “I was getting no traction at all,” he recalls of those pre-pandemic years, when he would do two or three auditions a week without booking a thing. “I realized that, given the numbers, it’s almost certain that this career isn’t going anywhere. I had to accept that and really be like, Okay, knowing that, what are you going to do? I chose film regardless.”
While he bided his time, Storrie threw himself into the city’s alternative theater “clown scene,” which he credits with teaching him to be unflinching in the face of exposure, both emotional and physical. (He recalls a live performance in which he played a birthday stripper who gets hit by a car en route to a gig. “I come in trying to be all sexy, but all of my limbs are broken,” he remembers, laughing.) Though there is little “trying” in the actor’s portrayal of the Russian sexpot Ilya—fans tend to agree, rather emphatically, that he’s succeeding—one sees echoes of this training in his embodied performance, an intuition for the character that guides everything from voice to gait to posture. “There are certain characters that are super easy to get into. Ilya is one of them,” he explains. “It was such a departure from who I am that the role may as well have been, like, a hobbit or something. I can’t help but be this totally altered thing.”
That isn’t to say that becoming Ilya didn’t require some study. As soon as he booked the role, Storrie began working with a dialect coach every day to master his Russian dialogue, which fans fluent in the language have noted is strikingly convincing (one tweet called him the “Meryl Streep of fake Russian accents and gay sex”). He also had to learn to skate, which he’d only done a few times growing up—though as a child, he displayed enough talent as a gymnast that a Russian figure skating coach once tried to “poach” him.
Online, much attention has been paid to Storrie’s physicality—his physique, really: the canonically accurate “hockey butt” that’s spawned a million TikToks and made the actor patron saint of leg day. Storrie appears nonchalant about the hunk label. “Playfulness” around sex and nudity was the norm in his alt theater scene; he gives the impression of seeing his body as more of a tool than an objet d‘art. “Making things that are taboo comfortable—that’s very much a part of my personal artistic interest,” he says of the show’s steamy sex scenes.
“It was such a departure from who I am that the role may as well have been, like, a hobbit or something.”
As his Instagram following skyrockets by tens of thousands daily, Storrie is limiting his time online. “You know how some people can’t drink because of their body chemistry?” he says. “When I’m online and the dopamine starts flowing, I’m like, Okay, this is a little too good. I need to get out.” He’s wary of consuming too many opinions about himself—even flattering ones. “It can be a really slippery slope for any creative, no matter what scale you’re being witnessed at.”
Of course, not all of that attention has been positive. In recent weeks, gay romance writers like Tobias Madden have expressed frustration that many of the most successful MM romances of the past decade—from Love, Simon to Heartstopper to Red, White & Royal Blue—were adapted from novels not written by gay men. And when actor Jordan Firstman made headlines for his critique of the co-leads’ decision to remain tight-lipped about their own sexualities, François Arnaud, one of the show’s out cast members, defended their choice, noting that Storrie and Williams “have been famous for nine days. Can we just give them a break?” These flare-ups have raised questions around ownership, authenticity, and who gets to tell gay stories.
But in the eye of this storm of attention, Storrie appears calm; he’s trying his best to stay present. In fact, he tells me, it’s only in the last few days that any of it has begun to feel real. And with season two of Heated Rivalry recently confirmed, Storrie is proving himself adept at leveraging its success toward other creative pursuits. (The actor also writes, photographs, paints, and makes “bizarre, experimental” music that “will never see the light of day.”) Recently, he wrapped his directorial debut—an indie feature shot on an iPhone that follows an alien who takes on human form. A dizzying bout in the spotlight would make most artists risk-averse, careful to chart the most palatable path possible. Not Storrie. Grinning, he tells me, “I’d rather swing big and miss the mark than try to please someone.”
Grooming by Ericka Verrett
Production by Krista Worby
Styling Assistance by Natalie O’Campo
Location: The Georgian
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