Jacob Tierney is a very busy man; he’s just moved into a new setup, his lunch delivery is missing, and he is about to enter months of production on one of the year’s most beloved shows, “Heated Rivalry.” But right now, one thing is on his mind: Shane and Ilya.
Before “Heated Rivalry” became a global sensation, it existed as six scripts written by Tierney, based on Rachel Reid’s queer ice hockey novel. The hit Crave original charts the enchanting romance of rival players Russian prodigy Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and Canadian golden boy Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams). An unpacking of toxic masculinity, beguiling yearning, and covert love, the show had fans clamouring for a piece of the show, whether it’s the Team Canada fleece or a soundtrack cassette.
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The latest release is “I’ll Believe in Anything,” a collection of annotated scripts and exclusive behind-the-scenes content that gives fans insight into how the show was made. Essentially, “I’ll Believe in Anything” is the bible for “Heated Rivalry” fans.
A few days into August, just as the gears on production of Season 2 start to turn, the creator, writer and director of “Heated Rivalry” sat down with IndieWire for an in-depth interview about his writing process.
The Mind and the Body
Tierney located memory as a framework to ground his adaptation of the heightened hockey romance that stretches over nearly a decade. “It’s everywhere, but especially in the beginning when memory feels hazy. For me, it was like everything they remember is with each other,” Tierney told IndieWire of his starting point.
He offers the example that if Shane were asked about his first World Juniors, he’d respond: “‘Oh, I met Ilya, I saw him down this tunnel. He was smoking, which was crazy.’ Everything is about the other person in that way.”
Functioning with dream-like logic, this notion of memory anchored the narrative but also let Tierney move through years with speed and clarity. At one point, Tierney tried to fill in the gaps in time but soon deemed it unnecessary.
This is apparent in the script’s opening scene: the pair’s awkward meet-cute was technically the eleventh scene, but after reassembling and streamlining the show’s opening beats, he jumped right into the action. “One of the points of that scene is that they’re saying nothing and Shane is being Mr. Polite Boy, like, ‘How are your parents? Do you miss Christmas?’ You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, who cares?,’” Tierney said with a laugh.
With memory comes the intertwining of reflection and imagination. Take the scene that concludes Episode 4, Shane having sex with Rose and Ilya masturbating in the shower. The sequence has stirred debate: are these shots reality or are they living in each other’s imagination? “For me, both are the answer,” Tierney said. “Shane’s thinking about Ilya, and Ilya’s thinking about Shane. This is the moment of understanding that their obsession is mutual and they also have different ideas about what the other person is living through. They think the other person is threatening them in some way.”
Another core tenet of Tierney’s scripts is that it’s not just dialogue communicating internalized thoughts, but body movement. Tierney explained that it was important to capture the character’s voice and personality through physicality: beyond the sex scenes, there’s Shane’s tense, restrained body opposite Ilya’s brooding, Slavic stare.
“Little physical moments are huge,” Tierney said. The tension between dialogue and action reveals the conflict between head and heart; wide shots give bodies room to articulate that silent communication. “You reveal it all in the way you move, the way you watch somebody move through the world. Acting is deeply physical, and I think good writing is too because dialogue is often a way to talk around something, and the body doesn’t lie, not in the same way.”
Deleting and Rewriting
Other revelations in the script book include deleted scenes, including one in which Ilya was intended to meet Shane’s parents, Yuna and David (portrayed by Christina Chang and Dylan Walsh), outside his fellow hockey player’s hospital room in Episode 5, instead of at the end of Episode 6. “That scene felt like gilding the lily, if I’m being honest,” Tierney said of the deleted moment. “I liked it initially, but I didn’t need that moment.”
So, what is Tierney’s criteria for a scene to make it into “Heated Rivalry”? “Essential scenes are Shane and Ilya; everything else is allowed to be off to the side,” he said. “There’s a ruthlessness to the storytelling, a focus that’s not very TV, it’s more like a movie about one relationship. If it’s about Shane and Ilya, it moves the story forward because the story is the way they feel about each other.”
The final episode of “Heated Rivalry” has two major emotional swells: a coming-out scene and an “I love you” confession. Interestingly, Tierney approached them very differently. The script book reveals the original coming out scene between Shane and Yuna, which Tierney rewrote on set. Recalling the decision, Tierney said, “It started raining, so we couldn’t finish it. I was just like, ‘I don’t like this, this isn’t working.’ When two actors are that good, and it’s not working, it’s my fault. I basically started it halfway through; this is a lot of talking around something.”
While Tierney wanted the coming out scene to be succinct in dialogue, elsewhere in Episode 6 he enjoyed slowing down and letting the dialogue breathe. The epitome of which is the “I love you” confession unfolding over several scenes in the sanctuary of Shane’s cottage.
“I prefer to write that way; I don’t like when conversations happen quickly, it makes me feel like I’m watching a shitty play,” Tierney laughs. “With the cottage, they needed to just be. They do a lot of doing, and now we need to see them being. The thing I added and liked the most was them on the couch, both on their phones. They’re just doing what normal couples do, and Shane and Ilya would be like: ‘I can’t believe we just get to sit on a couch and like, fucking zone out to Instagram reels. This is amazing. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
These scripts also show Tierney laying the groundwork for a second season.
For example, ice hockey players Ryan Price and Eric Bennett from Reid’s novels were originally going to appear; the former ended up being mentioned in passing, and the latter was cut. “We kept talking about Ryan Price, but there’s a time and a place for this,” Tierney said.
True to his word, a few weeks after our interview, Daniel Diemer was announced as Ryan for Season 2. Bartender Kyle Swift (Matthew Finlan), who briefly appears in Season 1 but has a fully fleshed-out character arc in Reid’s book “Common Goal,” was another Easter egg for fans. “The casting of Kyle was so important because there’s a world in which he gets his own show or this goes forward,” Tierney said.
The creator adds that it was hard to get the right actor for just one scene: “Matthew’s a really, really good actor. But how many times can we get that lucky if we’re just reading people for one scene? It felt too tricky and not worth it.”
Scripts on Set
Writing six scripts alone is one part of the experience; another is taking those pages onto set. Tierney’s scripts are precisely honed, and so it’s telling when the creator lets an actor embellish his writing. He recalled that by the latter half of the shoot, his actors had become “heads of department for each character.” Tierney noted this is especially true of later episodes where the actors bring these characters to life with lived-in nuance.
While physical action was heavily scripted and rehearsed, some of the fan favorite quotes emerged from these actors embodying the characters they’d got to know: Storrie’s “I’m sorry” when Ilya breaks down in front of Shane and his iconic “gimme kiss” pout; similarly, Williams’ hiccuped “bet-ter” phrase in the hospital as Ilya holds his hand weren’t scripted.
“People are like, ‘That’s improv.’ Improv is one thing, but I chose to use it,” Tierney said. “Actors make offerings; you choose to accept the offering, or you don’t. I want a set where people are comfortable enough to do that, especially at the cottage. That was the last stuff we shot; I was like, ‘These are your characters now, you can make decisions for them.’ I would love to hear what I wrote, but also let it breathe, add something in, add a pause I didn’t expect.”
Tierney continued, “The invitation is to surprise me, because there’s so much that’s even though I wrote it and I’m directing it, there’s so much that I didn’t think through, that’s the nice thing about giving a role to somebody and being like, ‘you’re the head of this department. What do you think [your character] would do here, and why?’”
So much love has been given to “Heated Rivalry,” with many waxing lyrical about why the show has been so successful: the casting, the male intimacy, and the rivals-to-lovers plot. Yet the release of “I’ll Believe in Anything” is a reminder that the greatest attributes of a strong book-to-screen adaptation include honoring the original text and respecting the characters.
From Little, Brown and Company, “I’ll Believe in Anything” is on sale now.