‘Heated Rivalry’ Casting Directors On Finding Connor Storrie & Hudson Williams: ‘Lightning in a Bottle’
Jenny Lewis and Sara Kay tell the backstory of the stars’ self-tapes and chemistry test: ‘You want to watch how hot they are together’
I cover TV and host Ankler Agenda. I interviewed Blumhouse president Abhijay Prakash about TV strategy, reported on film schools’ scramble to address industry disruption and dug into agents’ concerns about a Netflix-Warner Bros. deal. I’m elaine@theankler.com
Overnight success in Hollywood very rarely happens overnight. It’s almost always the result of years of slow builds, heartbreaking near-hits and a lot of behind-the-scenes work. And as Natalie Jarvey, Sean McNulty and I explored in the recent Ankler Agenda, for performers, breaking through the noise can feel impossible in an ultra-fragmented media — and attention-deprived —landscape.
But the rocket-like trajectory of Connor Storrie, 25, and Hudson Williams, 24, is the closest anyone in the industry has seen to overnight stardom in ages. Williams, born and raised in British Columbia, was working at an Old Spaghetti Factory there before he was cast in Heated Rivalry; Texas-born Storrie was likewise a server (and a clown) in Los Angeles. The odds on the duo becoming ultra-famous through this show, a gay hockey romance adapted from Rachel Reid’s Game Changer novels, were even lower given that it was originally made for Bell Media’s Canadian streamer Crave and only got a pickup from HBO Max as a distributor in the 11th hour. (HBO chief Casey Bloys told GQ it was “a very easy yes.”)
“Discovering stars now in 2026 — it’s not like what happened with Connor and Hudson is going to happen like over and over again, because we have a lot of successful shows here where someone will be the lead of a show that goes on 10 seasons on Canadian television, and they’re still not considered a star,” says casting director Sara Kay, who alongside Jenny Lewis conducted a far-flung search for the show’s stars in the spring of 2025. The Toronto-based casting directors — who’ve also worked on Prime Video’s The Boys and FX’s What We Do in the Shadows — spent a mere six to eight weeks casting not only the two leads but many other parts, including roles that would eventually go to François Arnaud and Robbie G.K.
The fact that Heated Rivalry is a Canadian series is a big part of why fresh voices and relative unknowns were given a chance to shine.
“If we are allowed to actually cast Canadians as our leads, then we see everybody,” says Lewis. “You’re not tied down to the whole, ‘Oh, there has to be a star who’s going to bring this kind of box office to the show in order for the show to be greenlit or get made.’ Crave backs a show, and it may become a vehicle for so many people to have amazing careers. We get to actually consider any actor… If you allow yourself to just find the magic and trust the good actors out there, then look at what happens.”
Related:
(Cough, cough: Take note, risk-averse studio and network executives.)
Lewis Kay Casting is again responsible for choosing a new class of hockey hunks to join the current cast for the next season of Heated Rivalry, already greenlit. By email after our initial interview, Kay says they’re “getting a lot of really beautiful heartfelt messages as well as some questionable topless photos :). We are thrilled that people are so excited and want to be on the show.”
Today, Kay and Lewis walk me through the process of casting Heated Rivalry’s Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, how they worked with show creators Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady, plus details on their set visit in Toronto where they were some of the first people to see the magic happening between the cast.
Our chat, condensed and lightly edited for clarity, gets into:
Self-tapes and Zooms: Exact details on the casting process and who — and what — they looked for first
Why it was “nerve-wracking” to cast Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, and what caught their eye about Storrie and Williams
Their first chemistry read and what might surprise you about it
The playbook of what casting directors really look for in a chemistry read
Why Kay and Lewis had to tamp down their enthusiasm about the two young actors at first: “You just play it cool”
The casting directors’ history with Jacob Tierney and how that powered their process
What Kay and Lewis saw on their first visit to the Heated Rivalry set that shocked them
‘Beyond Chemistry. They’re Hot Together’
Tell me how you approached the casting for Heated Rivalry’s two leads, and how you worked with creator Jacob Tierney on this.
Jenny Lewis: So we actually go back with Jacob quite a long time. I cast his very first feature, Twist, and then we cast (Tierney’s series) Letterkenny and Shoresy. When we got this script, we were like, gulp, because those were tall orders! The specificity of the characters is not just like, “Oh, those people are just out there.” The hockey and language, and Russian and half-Asian — it was a lot to stay true to the story.
That’s a very specific set of criteria. Did they have to know how to skate?