They Shoot, They Score
Canadian screens heat up this November with the release of Crave’s gay hockey romance series Heated Rivalry, funded the by Canada Media Fund. We talk with the show’s writer-director-producer Jacob Tierney and two stars, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, about making one of the year’s most anticipated shows.
Sitting on the set of reality-TV show The Traitors Canada, which he executive produces, Jacob Tierney found his dream project.
“I was reading the newspaper on my phone and on the front page of The Washington Post was an article about the romance industry,” says Tierney over the phone from Toronto.
“The headline was something like, ‘Romance is a billion-dollar-a-year industry, why doesn't anyone take it seriously? And then the sub-headline was, ‘Why are hockey romances so popular in America?’ And in the second paragraph they mentioned Heated Rivalry, and I called my producing partner Brendan Brady and said, ‘I know this is going to sound a bit crazy, but we're going to option this hockey book because if somebody else options this book, I think I will go bananas.’”
Heated Rivalry, book two in Canadian author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers gay-romance sports series, focuses on the steamy and very clandestine love affair between Canadian hockey star Shane Hollander and his Russian rival Ilya Rozanov.
Published in 2019, the book is considered the gold standard when it comes to hot gay sports stories. Looking at Tierney’s career, you understand why the veteran writer-director-producer was the perfect fit to adapt Heated Rivalry into a six-hour series for Crave that hits screens in November.
He’s queer.
And he understands hockey’s macho culture, having co-written, directed, produced and co-starred as Pastor Glen in Letterkenny, a show about life in a northern Ontario town where hockey is king. He also directed and produced Letterkenny’s spinoff Shoresy, in which he plays hockey commentator Benny Brodeur.
At age 46, Tierney is ready to tell a story that will break ground and win hearts.
“I think what people want out of romance is intimacy and joy,” says Tierney. “And I think that’s what a queer audience is going to get out of this show, which is so rare. There is no version of ‘Bury Your Gays,’” he says, referring to the trope that sees gay characters as expendable and most likely to die or be denied a happy ending in TV and movies.
“Nobody's going to go back to make a poor woman miserable in a heterosexual marriage. Nobody's going to kill themselves. Nobody's going to die of AIDS. These are two young, attractive men who f-ck and get to be in love and that is something that we as queer people are starved for.”
Tierney had to find the right actors to play uptight, anxious Shane and cocky, sexy Ilya throughout their eight-year relationship. Knowing the passionate fans of the book would scrutinize the leads, Tierney cast Texas-born Connor Storrie as Ilya and Kamloops, B.C., native Hudson Williams as Shane.
For 24-year-old Williams, who’s taking on his first leading role after a string of small parts in TV movies, the challenge was channeling Shane’s inner angst.
“I would say he's like a beautiful, neurotic flower,” says Williams on the line from Vancouver, where he resides. “He's introverted, socially anxious, I would say stunted in other realms besides hockey because he was so hyper-fixated on this one thing for so long.”
Storrie’s focus was on digging into Ilya’s cocky, yet guarded, personality.
“Ilya will hide what he's thinking and feeling until the day he dies,” says the 25-year-old actor on the line from L.A. “If he's excited over you, he's not going to let you know. If he's not into you, he's not going to let you know. It’s that Eastern European, stone-cold exterior. But what's going on, on the inside, and what's happening on the outside are two different things. And when it comes down to it, he loves harder than anyone. He's a beautiful dichotomy that Shane wants to discover.”
Storrie, whose biggest role before Heated Rivalry was as the inmate who kills Joaquin Phoenix at the end of Joker: Folie à Deux, had the added pressure of learning a Russian accent.
“The whole casting moved so quick,” he says. “I only had two weeks of dialect coaching before we started. And, in the series, there's a lot of Russian dialogue and I don't speak Russian, so I had to do a lot of work for that.”
Of course, two of the biggest questions are: Is there chemistry — gay, erotic chemistry — between the two leads; and will their passion be shown on screen? Audiences don’t want another Challengers where homoeroticism is more teased than explored in a meaningful way.
“They had such great chemistry, instantly,” says Tierney. “And they still do. They adore each other. They were so happy to be doing this, and they both really understood the assignment, the task. It's a lot to ask of a young actor.
“Acting is hard enough,” Tierney continues, “but when you add in that much nudity, that much intimacy, there's a lot and they were so supportive of each other. They're thick as thieves and I think you can see their affection for each other in every moment of the show.”
Storrie agrees about his chemistry with Williams.
“I feel really blessed because when you're doing intimacy and sex it’s a very human thing that you can't really fabricate,” he says. “I mean, as actors we do it all the time, but it's nice when we're both just naturally comfortable with each other so we’re able to focus on whatever we're doing rather than being like, ‘Oh, are you okay with this? Am I okay with this?’ Because Hudson is just so open and vocal and expressive and enthusiastic it was great.”
Williams believes Heated Rivalry belongs in the conversation with the best of on-screen gay storytelling, including a classic in the genre.
“I think of the similarity of Brokeback Mountain, set in a hyper-masculine world of cowboys, but then it’s a very tender romance,” he says. “Hockey is one of the most hyper-masculine sports out there that has a culture of good and some really bad masculinity, and then you put a fiery, passionate romance in the middle of it.
“And there's something that is pure about our love story, something unrestrained about it that doesn't feel like it's a tragedy. There's something celebratory about how much these two people love each other, and the problem is their environment, how they think other people will feel about it.
“But to each other it is a utopia.”
