Upside Down With Connor Storrie

“I’ve gaslit myself into believing that this is just for me and the 10,000 people who love the book.” Photo: Ritchie Jo Espenilla

Suspended six feet off the ground and surrounded by giant silks hanging from the ceiling, Connor Storrie is grappling gamely with the loss of gravity. As Lola Young plays over the speakers at the Aerial House, a brick-walled studio on Los Angeles’s Eastside, an instructor coaches Storrie through a flying banana roll and other poses until he’s heels over head. It’s an apt metaphor for the actor’s life since the Canadian TV series Heated Rivalry premiered at the end of November and shot the 25-year-old to international celebrity. Storrie plays stoic Russian hockey star Ilya Rozanov, who engages in an intense affair with Canadian opponent Shane Hollander, played by Hudson Williams, as the two scrabble for primacy within the sport. Based on the best-selling Game Changers books by Rachel Reid, creator Jacob Tierney’s adaptation has been hailed as a fresh, horny, deeply intimate take on the romance genre. Fans have spent the last several weeks littering social media with GIFs of Storrie and Williams’ naked butts. As Storrie flies around the room in a pair of black sweatpants and a worn-in white tee, his arm gripping one of the scarves, the instructor jokes, “We’re not trying to hurt it.” Storrie, a wide grin on his face, shoots back, “I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to hurt it.”

Storrie spent the last two years honing his raw physicality in L.A.’s clowning scene alongside comedians such as Natalie Palamides and Courtney Pauroso, whose show introduced him to the discipline. “Clown is all about making offers to the audience,” Storrie says after class, demonstrating how blowing raspberries at the crowd, or cooing at an audience member as if they’re a baby, could qualify as part of the performance. “If the audience likes it, then you keep doing it. And if the audience doesn’t like it, you have to react and sit with that, like, ‘Oh, you don’t like me?’” His mouth turns downward in exaggerated disappointment. “See how you laughed?” His most recent clown character was a birthday-party stripper who “got hit by the party bus that I’m supposed to strip on.” The character kept trying to disrobe but couldn’t stop writhing in pain. “It’s almost so hyperbolic that you can’t help but laugh,” he says. “It’s like, I’m not having fun, so you’re having fun.”

Through clowning, Storrie learned not to be squeamish, to fully commit, and to expand the audience’s comfort zone — all of which he called on for Heated Rivalry’s Ilya, who is often naked, physically and emotionally. In the series, Ilya and Shane struggle to verbally express their feelings, so their relationship grows through extended sex sequences. (Their first onscreen hookup clocks in at nine minutes, in which they share their first kiss, then take turns blowing each other.) During filming in Toronto, Storrie and Williams moved into apartments next to each other. “We would literally just go to set, go home, cook, work out together, and geek out over how excited we were to finally be working on this level,” he tells me at a nearby coffee shop after class. “If we were any less close, we probably would’ve gotten annoyed with each other really quick.”

They mapped out each carnal encounter beat by beat and discussed how to maintain the story’s emotional timeline while shooting the scenes out of order: “The kiss is going to be a little more passionate and hungry this time, or we’re kind of hiding from each other, so now it’s going to be more restricted and porny to show the lack of emotion,” he says, talking with his hands between sips of cold brew. “There are some lovey-dovey, intimate soft moments and then there’re some powerful getting-off moments.”

Storrie grew up in Odessa, the West Texas city featured in the 2004 movie Friday Night Lights, and describes his childhood in idyllic terms: “My entire time growing up was my grandparents sitting on the porch and me and my cousins running around with no shoes on, sunburnt as hell, covered in bug bites.” He can’t remember a time he didn’t want to become an actor, and that desire made him feel out of place. His favorite childhood movie was The Wizard Of Oz, with its transition from sepia to vibrant Technicolor, until his father showed him The Shining: “He was like, ‘People are going to reference this your entire life and you need to know what it is.’” He moved to an L.A. suburb in middle school, which made it easier for him to start auditioning, and in 2022, he landed a small but pivotal role in Joker: Folie à Deux, playing (spoiler) a prisoner who kills Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and seemingly reveals himself to be the real Joker of Batman lore. Storrie couldn’t tell his family he got the part and kept his participation a secret for the two years between production and release. When the movie came out in late 2024, it didn’t make the Oscar-winning splash of its predecessor, and Storrie retreated back into anonymity, auditions, and clowning.

Storrie as Ilya Rozanov in Heated Rivalry. Photo: HBO Max

When he first got the script for Heated Rivalry, he wasn’t familiar with the Game Changers books. He just thought it was a little Canadian hockey show. But after learning he was a finalist for the role of Ilya, Storrie threw himself into research, skating every day, and once he got the job, poring over the Russian language in the script with dialect coach Kate Yablunovsky. (At Seth MacFarlane’s holiday party over the weekend, a woman told him how disappointed she was to learn he’s not actually Russian.) Storrie also read Reid’s books and immersed himself in the online fan base. “My algorithm has been Heated Rivalry from the moment I started with these characters,” he says. “I’ve gaslit myself into believing that this is just for me and the 10,000 people who love the book.”

The sheer number of sex scenes in Heated Rivalry’s source material primed the series for virality, but the tidal wave of obsession took everyone involved by surprise. The day after the first episode premiered on HBO Max in the U.S., a viewer approached Storrie at the gym at 5:30 in the morning—a harbinger of sorts. The next day, the series hit No. 2 on the streamer, and Heated Rivalry mania consumed social media like rainbow-tinted wildfire. The books sold out immediately. Fans who advocated for international markets to pick up the series patted themselves on the back as HBO Max and Sky acquired it from Canadian streamer Crave. Fan accounts like @heatedrivalrycentral and @connorstupdates racked up tens of thousands of likes and followers across X, TikTok, and Instagram. Footage from an HBO Max holiday event in L.A. shows Williams surrounded by young women taking pictures as he wraps gifts and jokes with the crowd. Even the NHL couldn’t resist using a blocky font similar to the show’s on its Thanksgiving post. Storrie admits he and Williams played up their chemistry on the press tour. “If Hudson says something jokingly, like, ‘Spit in my mouth,’ I think that gives everyone else the go-ahead to get in on that too,” Storrie says. “People are ruthless talking about our holes and our butts.”

Heated Rivalry follows all the traditional beats of an enemies-to-lovers romance arc — disdain, attraction, consummation, repeat — but the fact that its characters are closeted, combined with the ferociously parasocial tendencies of online fandom, has contributed to a loud debate over whether the public gets to know about the performers’ sexuality. Surely this kind of chemistry can’t be faked? The show’s creator, Tierney, addressed this line of inquiry in a November interview before many had seen the show — “You can’t ask questions like that when you’re casting, right? It’s actually against the law” — which only inflamed speculation.

Storrie emphasizes that the sense of spontaneity viewers are responding to so deeply is all part of the illusion. Shooting the extensively choreographed sex scenes is every bit as planned out for the cameras as the hockey stunts. “For me, it doesn’t feel spicy at all — like, that’s me and my best friend,” he says. He leans over the little wooden café table in his black leather jacket and says quietly, almost reverently, “This is the first time in my life I’m having this many eyes on me. They’ve seen me naked, they’ve seen me kiss, they’ve seen me be in love with a man on screen — it’s only normal for people to try to transfer that over to mine and Hudson’s real life.” Storrie feels compelled to protect his privacy, if not for himself then for the people in his world who didn’t sign up for the kind of attention that comes with half a million Instagram­ followers. “I feel honored to be able to bring someone to life that so many people feel seen, understood, and represented by, and I think that transcends whoever I’m sleeping with in my real life.”

Storrie doesn’t know much about the future beyond his participation in season two of Heated Rivalry. Anyone curious about the plot can read The Long Game, the second book about Shane and Ilya in the Game Changers series and his personal favorite. Beyond that commitment, he cites Robert Pattinson, who achieved household-name status in Twilight, the romance-film franchise adapted from a popular book series, as someone whose career he’d love to emulate. “He swings really bold on his characters,” Storrie says. “He’s one of those people who’s so good it makes me jealous. Like, Damn, I want to do that.”

Meanwhile, in what little free time he currently has, Storrie makes industrial electronic music using the software program Ableton, a hobby he compares to doodling. “It’s literally called rhythmic noise — not, like, EDM stuff but kind of old school, very German, very Russian, big in Europe in the ’90s.” He’s just a few years removed from using a fake ID to get into raves in L.A.’s underground scene, where he prefers his music “ear-bloody loud” and experimental. Storrie sees the occasional movie — he watched Weapons in theaters three times — but prefers to spend time on his own creative pursuits. “I’m making music or I’m doing clown,” he says. “I don’t watch a lot of stuff. I have to be doing something.”