“Me and Hudson had the chemistry down before we even started acting,” says Connor Storrie, his arm draped around his co-star. That might be a bit of an understatement. Storrie and scene partner Hudson Williams shot to fame practically overnight thanks to Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romance series created by Jacob Tierney and based on Rachel Reid’s steamy series of novels.
Their bond only intensified once the cameras started rolling. “We got comfortable just being inches from each other’s face and invading each other’s personal space,” says Williams. “A nightmare for HR.” Storrie and Williams exude the confidence and raw sexual magnetism of seasoned pros. But in reality, both are fairly green actors experiencing their first brushes with true celebrity.
From Local Bars to International Screens
After Heated Rivalry premiered, the two generated headlines for surprising patrons at the West Hollywood gay sports bar Hi Tops. This sort of thing happens to A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Adele, who got a lot of press after making a 2019 trip to the New York bar Pieces. But for Storrie and Williams, it was a career-defining moment—an announcement that, whether or not they’re ready, they have arrived.
“I get very nervous,” says Storrie of their drop-in. “We’ve done a few surprise guest appearances. This was the first time after the show being released, so it felt a little bit…I don’t know, and maybe this was me projecting, but a little bit less about the story interacting with people and more about us and the show.”
“The Canadian in me was like, I can’t take up space,” says Williams. “It was one of the less structured things too, which is always daunting when they just give you a microphone. I don’t have a routine. I don’t have a bit.” Williams felt out of place at Hi Tops for another reason. “I’m like, I don’t even know if you guys are watching it,” he says. “Me and Connor had an irrational fear that they would be, like, ‘It’s Connor and Hudson!’ and [the crowd] would go… ‘What show?’”
The Global Impact of “Heated Rivalry”
For a show purportedly about ice hockey, Heated Rivalry is remarkably hot. The Canadian production follows Storrie’s Russian powder keg Ilya Rozanov and Williams’s responsible Canadian Shane Hollander over the course of their yearslong rivalry on the ice, and, much more importantly, their illicit romance off of it. After shooting from April to June, Heated Rivalry was set to premiere in Canada on November 28.
That could have been the end of the road for Heated Rivalry. But after intense online buzz and word of mouth, HBO Max picked up the series from its Canadian affiliate and decided to air it concurrently in the US and Australia as well.
“I think a week before the show dropped, [we found out] that we had gotten US distribution,” says Storrie. New Zealand and Spain have since been added to the list. “The whole thing has not made any sense, and has just been really overwhelming.”
To be clear, it’s a good kind of overwhelming. Storrie calls Heated Rivalry’s rapid climb “the best-case scenario.” “It’s like your dream has come true and you can’t really believe it,” agrees Williams. “I’m just so glad it can be in front of more eyes. I think this story does transcend language and culture.”
Behind the Scenes: The Journey to Fame
While it’s been a whirlwind, both Storrie and Williams have been preparing for this moment for a long time. As a mixed-race child—his mother is Korean, his father is British and Dutch—growing up in British Columbia, Williams had a lot of big dreams, some more achievable than others. “I wanted to become an NBA player,” he says. “My mom said, ‘You can’t dunk. Give up on this dream.’” So he came up with another: “Okay, then I’ll become an actor or a UFC fighter.” His mother was in favor of the former.
So Williams “quit my dreams of becoming the best NBA player ever, and then I wanted to become Daniel Day-Lewis.” He can’t help but add a self-deprecating joke: “That’s also not quite panning out. But I’m here.” At 24 years old, maybe it’s too early to say.
Before landing the role of dutiful Shane Hollander, Williams was starring in short films and landing one-episode guest roles on procedurals like Tracker and Allegiance. While he appreciated the work, he’d been waiting for his big break when Heated Rivalry came his way. “I have been manifesting this,” says Williams.
Unlike his co-star, Storrie has always had a one-track mind. “My mom says, ever since I could speak, I have always wanted to be in film,” says Storrie. As a kid in Odessa, Texas, he went to a performing-arts school—to learn how to act, and perhaps also to keep him out of trouble. “We did not live in the best part of town,” he says. “There was a push to help these neighborhoods where there was either crime or there was a significant amount of violence or poverty; they were trying to give all of us a break from that and were like, ‘Go tap dance or something.’”
Even so, the 25-year-old remembers his dreams repeatedly being met with skepticism rather than encouragement. When he was about seven or eight, his aunt “did the ‘Okay, well, when that doesn’t work out, what are you going to do?’ thing,” he remembers. Like any good actor, he did have a backup plan. “I genuinely thought for a second and I said, ‘I’m going to be an underwear model if [acting] doesn’t work out,’” he says, laughing. “I think that shows how willing I was to be perceived from such a young age.”
Intimacy and Authenticity on Screen
These days, he’s certainly being perceived. On Heated Rivalry, both Williams’s and Storrie’s athletically accurate hockey butts are on display multiple times per episode. (“Thank you for tweeting about our butts,” Storrie joked to the crowd at Hi Tops.) Some actors might be self-conscious about this. Not Williams and Storrie.
“I do performance-art theater in LA. I do underground alt theater that gets very bizarre, very exposed, very raunchy,” says Storrie. “I’m used to being exposed and not very clothed in vulnerable circumstances, and enjoying that part of the artistic process. So, I mean, once you get over the initial discomfort of having your butt out, [it’s] pretty easy.”
“Yeah, I don’t really struggle with that,” says Williams. “I think an actor has to be comfortable being naked both physically and emotionally. That’s the stepping stone.” To Williams, a film set is “one of the more comfortable places I’ve been naked.” For a short film, he recalls wearing a leopard-print Speedo while filming near a high school graduation “of maybe 300 people who shouldn’t be seeing that.” “They were like, ‘That’s where we have to shoot this shot.’”
It’s one thing to crash a high school graduation in a speedo. It’s another to have graphic, simulated gay sex on television (or streaming). Luckily for Storrie and Williams, Heated Rivalry had intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter to walk them through their many intimate scenes. “In those scenes—the sex specifically—a lot of it is so technical,” says Storrie, giving an example of one quandary: “Okay, how do I keep my knee in this position to not show my penis?”
What was more intimate—and arguably, more exciting—were the moments between the sex scenes. After taking a detour in episode three to explore the romantic life of another closeted queer hockey player (in this universe, there are at least three!) Hollander and Rozanov are center stage once more in Heated Rivalry episode four. Spoiler alert: They have sex on a couch. But for Storrie and Williams, the moments preceding and following the act—involving tuna melts and meltdowns—that really mattered.
“So much of their story is them not being 100% authentic with one another,” says Williams. “So when we actually had scenes that we got to sit down and genuinely act, and not have any of the gimmicks of these two people flirting, it was fun and so easy. When we had scenes that had to be emotional like that, I don’t know if it’s ever been easier in my life to feed into it.”
“That scene from the tuna melt, after he comes back from that phone call—we shot those always continuously. We didn’t really break it up,” says Williams. “We would go from the conversation, into the sex, into the double-jerking, into the departure. You had momentum where it feels like you can really dig your teeth into those scenes.”
Double-jerking aside, it’s Williams and Storrie’s intimate bond—which they cemented by getting almost-matching tattoos of the phrase “Sex Sells”—that sells the series. “We already had a pretty close bond that made it comfortable going into territories where you’re closer with a person than any other coworkers are with their coworker. Unless they’re sleeping together,” says Williams, laughing.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Storrie and Williams
And while many fans online seem deeply concerned with Williams and Storrie’s own sex lives, the two stars aren’t paying too much attention to the discourse. “We’ve been really busy since the show has come out, so I haven’t been able to really dive too far into the online thing,” says Storrie, who says he wasn’t really online much before the show premiered either. “I try to be involved and take in as much as I should, but it’s so easy to get lost in the sauce. You can’t help but want to dive into opinions about yourself. It’s like being in middle school when a friend who’s not really your friend is like, ‘Josh said this thing about you.’ I can’t help but be like, ‘What did Josh say about me?’ But I try to stay off of it.”
Williams admits he “dips in and out” of the online discourse. “Thankfully, everything’s been overwhelmingly positive,” he says. “And at the end of the day, I do care what people think. I can’t lie and say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ No: I wanted to give something that’s well-received, and selfishly, I want people to like it. But it becomes a very fragile line of how far you can tip in either direction.”
As Heated Rivalry continues to captivate audiences worldwide, the journey of Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams is just beginning. Their chemistry on screen and off has not only brought them fame but has also set the stage for what promises to be a bright future in the entertainment industry.
