Heated Rivalry’s Costume Designer Also Loves Ilya’s Leopard Shirt (And Shane’s Sexy Reading Glasses)

The Shane thing is interesting because I think there’s just so much discomfort in the character himself, in the world outside of being an athlete. Like, Hudson is doing that great. [Laughs] Hudson and Shane are very different people. What a great thing for him that people are really seeing what a wonderful job he did on screen for the show. Connor, too—very different people than the characters they play. But yeah, Shane, I don’t think we could get him to go much further. And then, cut, I have him in very straight-cut suits, a little bit of tailoring, but nothing crazy, really simple lapels for all the tuxedos. Ilya’s tuxedos, we did double-breasted and peak lapel and different colors and played around with that a little bit more. I think it’s all just about trying to tap into the real character beats. Shane, I think, just doesn’t exist in the world that way.

Speaking of Shane, there are two notable pairs of eyewear in this season. He and Kip both wear reading glasses, and they’re both really good. One, do you recall where they’re from?

The brand? I don’t think it’s anything fancy. Hopefully with season two, we can get some brand partnerships and I can get some great stuff… Because our budget wasn’t huge. We were working with a relatively limited budget in terms of high-end [pieces], so I was trying to be really strategic. I was like, “The glasses, as long as they look like the right shape…” That was actually for Shane’s glasses particularly—we had to go through, I think, one of the executive producers to make sure that she could sign off because she’s a huge fan of the books, so it needed approval. Whereas most of the other stuff, it was me being like, “I think we should do this,” and Jacob [Tierney, who wrote, directed, and produced the show] saying, “Tweak a little.” But generally, I had a lot of freedom to do what I wanted.

And then the glasses were a real sticking point, and I tried probably about 10 to 15 pairs, especially for Hudson, for Shane. For Kip [played by Robbie G.K.], I was like, “These feel right.” We didn’t need to try as many because I had one that felt like, “art-history student” that could work for him. But yeah, for Shane, I had a case full of glasses that we went through because you just have to have them. I remember we tried them on set and had everybody be like, “Those ones.” Yeah, these things are important because they’re in the imagination of the people reading [the books by Rachel Reid, upon which the show is based]. They’re visualizing it and wanting to get [a pair] that kind of felt classic, but also nerdy in a way, and maybe a little bit outside of that athletic persona of who Shane is.

Yeah, Shane’s glasses are that clubmaster-style, super bookish.

Yeah, and maybe give a little bit more depth, more variety to who this person is. Because if you lean too much on archetype, you lose the details of the individual person. So, trying to find the little artifacts that we can sprinkle in and make him a little bit more grounded and real.

That was a team effort. Actually, our graphics guy, Stephen Crowhurst, he was amazing. He did the logos. He would do multiple options and then we would all talk about it, but there was definitely the intention for innuendo I think was there from the beginning, and it’s so fun. The show is so fun because there’s so much space for it, and people are starting to clock into what the different things look like.

Yes, the logo of the fictional Boston Raiders is meant to look like that…

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…and the logo of the equally fictional Montreal Metros is meant to look like that.

Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max

I honestly didn’t notice until I saw that interview and I was like, “Okay, that’s really funny.”

I know, I know. We’ll see about the future teams. I know we’ll have Ottawa, for sure, I think, for season two. Yeah, the logos are amazing. We all were very collaborative for those kinds of things that impact everything because it’s jerseys, they had to do the locker rooms, they had a carpet made. All of these things that kind of are cross-departmental, we would have multiple conversations about early on. It was cool to see this and giggle as we went about making all the little things that we had.

This interview has been edited and condensed.