{"id":206111,"date":"2026-04-22T15:48:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T15:48:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/206111\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T15:48:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T15:48:54","slug":"an-instagram-dm-changed-everything-for-heated-rivalry-nbc-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/206111\/","title":{"rendered":"An Instagram DM changed everything for \u2018Heated Rivalry\u2019 \u2013 NBC New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the cheers and applause of thousands of BookCon attendees, \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d author<\/a> Rachel Reid and director-screenwriter Jacob Tierney walked on to the main event stage at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center. The two Canadians have been international celebrities for just a few months, and still find themselves wondering if all the noise is for someone else.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t really get to experience this kind of energy and fandom in person very often,\u201d Tierney told The Associated Press just after their joint appearance, a highlight of the weekend gathering of (mostly) young book fans. \u201cIt\u2019s been a bit more of an amorphous online thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the first episode of \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d dropped last November, Tierney’s adaptation of Reid’s \u201cGame Changer\u201d series featuring star-crossed hockey greats Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov has become a phenomenon that boosted the sport’s popularity,<\/a> made Reid a leader of the thriving genre of sports romance fiction and made Olympic torchbearers out of lead actors Hudson Williams (Shane) and Connor Storrie (Ilya). Tierney expects to begin filming the second season this summer, based in part on the second of Reid’s novels about Shane and Ilya, \u201cThe Long Game.\u201d The author, meanwhile, is working on a third Shane and Ilya book, \u201cUnrivaled.\u201d Both are scheduled for 2027 releases.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d fans know well the story of how the HBO Max show was born, and of Reid’s jarring swing from despair to exhilaration. In August 2023, she learned that she had early onset Parkinson’s disease<\/a>. Days later, she received an Instagram message from a man she had never met, but would soon change her life in a very different way: Tierney.<\/p>\n

The 46-year-old Tierney is a Montreal native, former child star and award-winning filmmaker whose credits include the TV series \u201cLetterkenny.\u201d In October, Little, Brown and Company will release a collection of Tierney’s annotated scripts, \u201cI’ll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1.\u201d <\/p>\n

Reid, 44, is a longtime hockey fan. Born Rachel Goguen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she chose her pen name for the practical reason that it’s easier to pronounce and remember. She’s been open about the impact of fame and her health, posting an Instagram announcement in February that she was pushing back the release date of \u201cUnrivaled\u201d from this fall to next summer. Onstage, she acknowledged it had been \u201ctricky\u201d to write since the series took off.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m in a place where the whole world seems to care about what happens next to these characters,\u201d she said. \u201cI’m still determined to stick to what I’ve always done when I was writing, just kind of pretend I’m writing for me and I hope other people like it.\u201d<\/p>\n

During their AP interview, Reid and Tierney spoke of the joy of sex on the page and screen and how Shane and Ilya just won’t leave them alone. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n

AP: Writers talk about writing the books they want to read, and filmmakers making the movies they want to see. With these books, it comes out of that?<\/p>\n

REID: I really like a forbidden romance. I really like the rivals-to-lovers element. I just also like a queer love story with a happy ending. And I really like hockey, so I think there\u2019s just a lot of elements in it that are just very much what I personally would like. I think if this show had come out and had nothing to do with me, I would be obsessed with it still.<\/p>\n

TIERNEY: I did not grow up with stories like this. We don\u2019t as gay men, as queer people. We do not get to have happy endings in media very often. I would definitely have watched it (even if he didn’t direct it), that\u2019s for sure. I\u2019m sure I would have had notes. I’m a little picky.<\/p>\n

AP: At what point for either of you did you realize that you had something big here?<\/p>\n

TIERNEY: It was a kind of a series of increasingly surreal and overwhelming moments. And by the time the sixth episode aired, it really did feel like we were kind of at the center of a strange maelstrom. But I also was like, \u201cAm I making this up? Is this actually happening?\u201d<\/p>\n

REID: I did a bookstore event the day after the trailer came out. They showed the trailer at the event, and everybody in the audience knew every word of the trailer and was saying it along with the trailer. So that was when I was like, \u201cOK, this is going to be nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHudson Williams is opening up about how he’s handling fame after the massive success of his show, “Heated Rivalry.” The 24-year-old was on the Jan. 20 episode of Evan Ross Katz’s “Shut Up Evan” podcast.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

AP: Writers and filmmakers have talked about the difficulty of writing or filming sex scenes. Was that a challenge for either of you?<\/p>\n

REID: Honestly, I love writing them and I\u2019ve never found that to be the difficult part. I think it might be the easiest part for me. I actually really enjoy it. Not to praise myself too much, but I think maybe that\u2019s why people like the scenes. They weren\u2019t hard for me. It\u2019s not a scary thing. It\u2019s not the part that I have to close my eyes and write or anything. It’s my favorite part.<\/p>\n

TIERNEY: Sex is a language in this show, sex is a way that we watch this couple evolve over the course of a fairly long amount of time in terms of the story, eight years. And so the sex is different every time, a way of watching them evolve both separately and together. I think sex reveals a lot about yourself that you don\u2019t even intend to reveal. And I find that quite fascinating as a storyteller.<\/p>\n

AP: How real are Ilya and Shane for you? Do they live on in your heads? <\/p>\n

REID: Yeah. That\u2019s why I keep writing books about them, because they just keep talking. With other characters, I\u2019ve written the books and they\u2019ve left. But these guys just stick around.<\/p>\n

AP: What is it about them that makes it that way? <\/p>\n

REID: They’re fun to write. I love it.<\/p>\n

AP: You’ve talked about your struggles with getting the next book done. Any updates on that? <\/p>\n

TIERNEY: It’s a coloring book now.<\/p>\n

REID: It\u2019s 20 pages.<\/p>\n

TIERNEY: Don\u2019t tell the truth.<\/p>\n

REID: The thing that hasn\u2019t changed is how much fun they are to write. I find their voices very easy to put on the page. More than any other characters I\u2019ve created, they arrived fully formed. They kind of just appeared one day.<\/p>\n

AP: Were they based on anybody, at least loosely, who you know?<\/p>\n

REID: There\u2019s a lot of myself in Ilya, for sure. There\u2019s a lot of, kind of hockey player archetypes \u2014 the flashy, cocky European superstar, that\u2019s definitely a type. The uptight, very serious good boy-captain. And there\u2019s been plenty of NHL players from decades of hockey. And I\u2019ve been a fan for decades. And obviously there have been some really great rivalries. And we\u2019re getting probably to the end of the (Sidney) Crosby-(Alex) Ovechkin rivalry right now. But that rivalry at its peak was so fun.<\/p>\n

AP: What do you see of yourself in Ilya?<\/p>\n

REID: A sense of humor, mostly. It’s a little bit mean. I also kind of like to use humor to cover up emotions, you know, things like that. I think I also notice things about people a bit, but maybe stay quiet about it.<\/p>\n

AP: I’ve heard a lot of writers talk about writing a book that gets made into a film. And the actors are just so good that when the writer comes back to writing about those characters, they\u2019re seeing those actors in their head. Is it going that way for you?<\/p>\n

REID: I told Jacob I wish I had never met them. (Laughing) It is challenge writing without thinking about somebody having to actually say or do what I\u2019m writing, for sure. I\u2019m trying to just block that out. I just need to pretend it definitely will never happen, because I think that\u2019s the only way I can do it.<\/p>\n

AP: And you still hope to have the next book out at some point next year?<\/p>\n

RR: Yeah. That book will come out June 1. Hell or high water, it’s coming out.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe two leads of “Heated Rivalry” are melting hearts with their steamy chemistry!\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To the cheers and applause of thousands of BookCon attendees, \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d author Rachel Reid and director-screenwriter Jacob…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[36197,9,11,10,2556],"class_list":{"0":"post-206111","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-books-and-literature","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-television"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}