Editor’s note: This interview with Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie about Heated Rivalry was originally conducted on November 11, 2025, for this story, published on Nov. 20. It is now being reprinted in its entirety, edited only for clarity.
Last April, I began to hear the first rumblings of a low-budget Canadian gay hockey romance that was being filmed in Toronto, about a half hour away from where I grew up. At the time, Heated Rivalry, a TV series based on the second book in author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, was in the nascent stages of being adapted by Jacob Tierney—one of the creative forces behind the cult favorite Canadian sitcoms Letterkenny and Shoresy—for a little-known national streamer called Crave.
For the next few months, I kept a close eye on the groundswell of support around Heated Rivalry. The initial casting announcement in June delighted book readers, many of whom could scarcely believe that their favorite smutty gay hockey romance novel was being brought to life. The first glimpse of Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov—the characters whose clandestine love affair would drive the arc of the first season—only stoked the growing fan frenzy.
By the fall, it was clear to me that the Heated Rivalry team was about to strike gold. (My editor at Teen Vogue, thankfully, was on the same page.) Despite the fact that the show had yet to find a distributor outside of Canada, I reached out to Crave in early October to negotiate writing the first major story about Heated Rivalry. After weeks of back and forth, I landed two interviews—one with Tierney alone, one with Williams and Storrie paired—in early November.
On November 11 at around 1 p.m. ET, less than three weeks before the first two episodes were slated to premiere, I found myself on a three-way video call with the stars. I was calling in from a location a couple hours outside Toronto; Williams was at home in Vancouver; and Storrie, who had been shooting his directorial debut, was taking a quick break at his home in Los Angeles. Storrie was dressed in a black T-shirt and donned a baseball cap with the word “MALIBU” emblazoned on the crown; Williams wore a cozy-looking lilac hoodie. Before I pressed record, they confessed that they had yet to do an extended interview together. (In retrospect, I may have been preparing them for the whirlwind press tour they would embark on a week later.)
Williams and Storrie were articulate and earnest, even as they navigated the delicate task of discussing their shared intimacy on screen. Despite their limited experience with the press, their connection translated through the screen; even on Zoom, I could see glimpses of the crackling chemistry that had originally sealed the deal for Tierney and the production team. But none of us could have predicted how quickly the show would hit the cultural zeitgeist.
In the two-and-a-half months since that conversation, Williams and Storrie have found themselves at the center of a pop culture phenomenon. They have carried the Olympic torch in Italy, made their late-night talk show debuts, presented at the Golden Globes, and walked into industry parties where their peers—the artists they grew up idolizing—are making a beeline to talk to them. Only Williams and Storrie can truly understand just how profoundly their lives have changed. They’re already a world away from the people they were when we first sat down for the chat, below.
Teen Vogue: Jacob Tierney, the creator of Heated Rivalry, told me that he knew that you were the right actors to play Shane and Ilya as soon as you guys read on Zoom together. It’s hard to gauge chemistry on a video call like the one we’re on right now, but what specifically do you remember from that process of reading together?
Hudson Williams: I remember the first read with Connor because he was the second actor I read with. I was briefed that he 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. I had already read lots of the book at that point and knew the characters, and his face was so hard to read. [Storrie breaks out into a shocked smile.] 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 [imitates slight curve of the lips]—that’s all I got.
