“These actors are so bold,” says Heated Rivalry intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter. “I can’t overstate how much of these characters they just brought. We kept saying, Oh my God, I can’t believe they’re doing that.”
Photo: HBO Max
Jacob Tierney wants to be clear: The lack of frontal nudity in Heated Rivalry was entirely his call. Crave, the Canadian streamer behind his breakout hit, gave him carte blanche to adapt the second novel in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, six unabashedly horny romances set in the world of men’s professional ice hockey. Tierney, the writer-director-producer behind the sitcoms Letterkenny and Shoresy, didn’t want to fuss with prosthetics — and, more important, didn’t think a penis added anything. “These are sex scenes, not nudity scenes,” he says. On this show, that distinction matters: The story is the sex, and the sex is the story.
Heated Rivalry follows rival professional hockey captains Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) through eight years of competition and clandestine hookups. Early on, nearly every interaction between them is a sex scene, driving both the plot and their character arcs. “Sex is their language, their way of communicating,” Tierney says, and what sets the show apart is the precision. Most scenes are pulled straight from Reid’s novel, each tilt of a chin and press of a pec choreographed to the page. “Random sex scenes are easy to film,” Tierney says, but adapting a smutty novel, where intimacy drives the plot, is harder. “It’s akin to dancing. Both are deeply physical. Both demand practice and exact camera placement. Not dissimilar to the hockey, if I’m being honest.”
To pull it off, Tierney hired Chala Hunter, an intimacy coordinator and actor he’d directed a decade earlier in a Montreal production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. Hunter was on set almost every day, guiding choreography and staying attuned to the actors’ embodied experience. “I’m sensing in real time if something needs to change,” she says. “It’s almost like I’m acting at the same time.” Her job, partly, was to follow Williams’s and Storrie’s lead — to support, not control them — and welcome the levity they brought to the most vulnerable scenes. Mid-setup, one might call out, “‘Is my pelvis placed correctly? Can you see my sock?’ Which is what they started calling their modesty garments,” she recalls. “And I’d be like, ‘No, no, you’re good.’” Or, occasionally: “Drop your left hip an inch.”
In the run-up to the finale, Tierney and Hunter describe how they brought Heated Rivalry’s sex scenes from page to screen. “We really had a joyful experience as a production,” Hunter says. “It’s a gift to work with actors who surprise themselves — and surprise you.” She remembers a moment in the yet-to-air finale episode, “The Cottage,” when Storrie improvised a beat so unexpected she had to step away from the monitors. “I couldn’t stop laughing. These actors are so bold. I can’t overstate how much of these characters they just brought. We kept saying, Oh my God, I can’t believe they’re doing that.”
“Jacob and I agreed early on to be as technical and precise as possible,” Hunter says. She went through Tierney’s scripts scene by scene, logging every instance of nudity or intimacy in an enormous spreadsheet: “I wanted to make sure we were representing queer sex — specifically gay male sex — in a way that felt authentic to the community.”
Some directors take a looser approach, filming whatever their actors are willing to do. Tierney came in with a blueprint. “Every scene was so specific,” Hunter says. “I’m talking every word.” She met with the actors one-on-one, reading the scripted actions aloud and asking how they imagined the scenes playing out on set. With Williams and Storrie, there was so much material to go through that the calls had to be split into multiple hour-and-a-half sessions. “My mouth got so dry from talking,” she says. In consulting with the actors, she described Tierney’s vision in deliberately neutral terms, so as not to create pressure. “This one will probably be a wide shot,” she might say. “What levels of nudity are you comfortable with? Is there anything you don’t want the camera to see?”
Then production set aside a day for rehearsals, with Hunter, Tierney, Williams, and Storrie blocking each scene and testing out positions and camera angles. “It’s like stuntwork,” Hunter says. She creates the steps, sets the parameters, and relies on her knowledge of each performer’s boundaries and consent levels to guide each logistical choice — when to close a set and whether to prepare modesty garments and nudity riders. “We do all this prep, all this communication, all this rehearsal,” she adds, “so that when we shoot, everyone’s on the same page and the actors are free to just act.”
Shane and Ilya first take their relationship into explicitly sexual territory before the start of their rookie season. After filming a commercial together, the rivals openly observe each other’s bodies in the locker-room showers. Ilya begins masturbating, and Shane watches, both aroused and panicked. “The biggest thing about a shower scene is literally just the water,” Hunter says. “Showering for an hour and a half is a long time. You get so wrinkly.” Because of the nudity, the set was closed. Only select crew members were present, keeping the temperature steady and standing by with towels and robes for Williams and Storrie. Monitors were limited and flagged to prevent accidental viewing, and phones and photography were banned. The footage itself was also restricted, Hunter explains, “to protect the vulnerability of any performer.” The actors’ modesty garments — a “padded pouch with a tail” Hunter sourced from the Brooklyn brand Covvier — kept filling with water. Between takes, the actors would squeeze it out. “It’s kind of a hilarious element,” she says.
Hunter compares the scene’s choreography to a staged theatrical punch. To simulate Ilya’s masturbation, Storrie worked from an “anchor point,” a spot on his body that grounded the movement and kept it precise and controlled. “You throw the punch, then hit another part of your body to produce the sound, depending on your position onstage,” Hunter explains. “You have to consider how the rest of the body might respond — how your breathing changes, how your hand moves, where your arm is, where you’re looking, where the other character is looking. It’s about creating a movement in the actor’s body that reads on-camera, that gives the viewer the idea of what’s happening.”
After Shane shuts down Ilya in the shower (“Not here”), Ilya asks for his room number. Later that night, they meet in Shane’s hotel room for their first hookup, and Shane has his first sexual experience with a man. Every beat in Heated Rivalry’s longest sex scene was scripted, with one exception: Williams chose to keep Shane’s socks on. (“I never told him to do that, but I never told him to stop,” Tierney said on a podcast.) The evolution of Shane and Ilya’s physical encounters is part of the story, so whenever the order was off, Hunter says, “it actually didn’t feel right. What Jacob had written was how it should go.”
Hunter broke down the nine-minute scene with Williams and Storrie, talking through each beat as they rehearsed. “I remember all of us working together to be like, now your thumb goes in his mouth, now you kiss, now your shirt comes off, and now you go down to your knees,” she says. Once the actors knew the sequence, Hunter felt it made more sense in their bodies, too: “And then, of course, they had to find a way to be free inside of that and let it all go.”
By the end of the pilot, Shane and Ilya have hooked up once more since their post-shower encounter, but their next planned hookup, this time penetrative, is derailed by a snowstorm. After Shane wins Rookie of the Year in Las Vegas, he finds Ilya sulking on a rooftop. The two argue — Shane assumes it’s about the award, but Ilya is dreading his return to Russia — and the fight escalates into a passionate kiss.
Fans have Hunter to thank for that moment. For her, a big part of the job is keeping the intimacy aligned with the narrative. Does this kind of kissing make sense for where the characters are emotionally? If it’s only their second or third kiss, but the actors are already 20 days into filming, she might note, “They seem a little comfortable — this kiss is coming across as more familiar.”
Tierney has seen your complaints about the first time Shane and Ilya have penetrative sex, which takes place in episode two, “Olympians.” “People are like, When did Shane prep?” he says. “This is not a documentary. You wanna watch them douche? You want me to include Shane in the bathroom for half an hour with the fucking enema? That’s not what we’re doing here. We’re skipping that part.”
What the scene did need to do was register as intensely vulnerable. To get there, Tierney and Hunter isolated Shane and Ilya’s imagined physical sensations, tracking how each one built on the last. Tierney talked through those sensations explicitly, giving Williams and Storrie a shared framework for what their characters were experiencing. “I said this to the boys before everything: I don’t care what you’ve done,” Tierney recalls. “I never want to assume anybody has experienced anything, so I’m gonna say some stuff out loud.” Then he might add, “In my experience, the first time you’re penetrated feels like this.”
From there, Williams and Storrie worked with Hunter to make each sensation legible to the viewer. “Connor would be like, Okay, when I press that way on your thigh, that means I’m halfway in,” says Tierney. “They just created a whole language for it.”
Though Tierney’s script often has Ilya taking the lead — telling Shane, for instance, to get on his stomach — Hunter says it’s ultimately up to the actor to choose how to navigate those actions. To prepare, she and Storrie talked through what it means to be in charge while still taking care of someone. “You express it through your body — whether you’re rough or tender, moving slow or fast, how you kiss or simulate placing your hand,” she explains. “What’s your emotional intention, and how are you playing that?”
Everyone was nervous going into Shane and Ilya’s Vegas sex scene in “Olympians.” Although the characters have already hooked up several times within the show’s chronology, it was the first intimate scene filmed for the series. “You’re trying to set the right tone with the actors,” Hunter says. “It was pretty major for all of us.”
The hardest part, Hunter recalls, was keeping the actors’ modesty garments out of frame — especially during Shane’s front roll across the bed. “Hudson had to be a gymnast,” she says. “I remember telling him: ‘If you bring that leg down, and you swivel that hip down, and then you press your whole body to the bed, we won’t see it.’” Repeating Shane’s underwear toss was no easier. “Imagine being mostly naked, with ten other people on set, trying to act like you don’t care where you’re tossing something, but also having to hit the same exact spot 30 times, because that’s how many takes you’re doing to get different angles,” Hunter explains. “We had to do a lot of underwear throwing.”
Hunter compares these technical demands to a scene in episode four, “Rose,” in which Shane’s girlfriend, Rose Landry (Sophie Nélisse), drops her dress. To get the shot, Nélisse had to hit the exact mark for the dress to fall at the right angle, then ascend a staircase in her modesty garment, with the camera moving and Williams following behind. “I want to applaud Sophie for that,” says Hunter. “It wasn’t easy.”
Shane and Ilya’s post-tuna-melt hookup in “Rose” marks a turning point in their relationship. In true hockey-bro fashion, the rivals have only ever used each other’s last names. But on Ilya’s couch, as Shane climbs on top of him, their first names finally slip out.
While navigating the scene’s technical demands — like concealing how Williams simulated manual stimulation — produced moments of humor, Hunter remembers it stirring up emotions on the closed set. “It gave the whole crew the feels,” she says. “We’re so invested in the characters at that point, so when they say each other’s names, it shows that, not only do they have this incredible chemistry, but they’re also starting to care for each other,” she says. “And that makes it even more attractive — and also heartbreaking.”
See All
