The “Heated Rivalry” takeover continues. Connor Storrie, who portrays Ilya Rozanov on the Crave/HBO Max hit, will make his late-night television debut on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on Monday, January 12.
The news comes one day after it was announced that his costar, Hudson Williams, will make his late-night TV debut on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on Wednesday, January 7.
Since the series debuted in November, it has become a smash hit for both Bell Media’s Crave in Canada and HBO Max, who acquired the series right before it was released.
An adaptation of the “Game Changers” novels, “Heated Rivalry” tells the love story between Ilya and Shane Hollander (Williams), two closeted hockey players who get into a secret romantic relationship; over the course of the six episodes, the relationship grows from purely physical to deeply romantic.
Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie, Dylan Walsh and Christina Chang in “Heated Rivalry” finale.
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In the finale, the duo finally gets to spend two weeks together and exchange “I love yous.” Their relationship is also revealed to Shane’s parents and Ilya stays by his side as he comes out.
“That was the element of the story that I was most excited to get to because it’s really cool the way that [creator] Jacob Tierney wrote it,” Storrie recently told Variety about the finale at the cottage. “There’s this kind of cool crescendo where it was so fast and rapid — the editing, the writing – with so much energy upfront, and then it kind of lands and we’re just two people in a house for a few days.”
He continued, “As an actor, that’s where a lot of the cool acting moments are, where we really get to sit in some of those scenes for a long, long time. It’s kind of the episode where there’s officially a catharsis. People don’t realize, because of all the intimate scenes, but this story really is about people falling in love at a distance. To finally see that come together, there’s a catharsis.”