Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie were apparently more than willing to bare everything for Heated Rivalry — but creator Jacob Tierney says he was the one who decided audiences didn’t need to see quite that much.
As if Heated Rivalry season one wasn’t already steamy enough, it turns out viewers could have seen considerably more of its two leads.
Series creator Jacob Tierney has revealed that Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie were both willing to film full-frontal nudity while playing hockey rivals-turned-lovers Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.
But Tierney turned them down.
“I was like, ‘I’m not showing your dicks,’” he told actor Andrew Rannells during a conversation promoting his new book, I’ll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1 (The Annotated Scripts).
According to Tierney, the decision had nothing to do with reluctance from Williams or Storrie.
“They were very game,” he said, explaining that both actors were willing to “show everything”.
The limit came from what Tierney believed the scenes actually needed.
“It’s about what I wanted to show,” he said.
Sex scenes without improvising
Tierney also used the conversation to explain how Heated Rivalry approached the show’s much-discussed intimate scenes.
Rather than arriving on set and asking actors to simply “make it sexy”, Tierney says the physical action was mapped out carefully ahead of filming.
He worked with intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter, with conversations about nudity, boundaries and intimacy garments happening well before cameras rolled.
Tierney said he deliberately wrote the sex scenes with as much specificity as possible so the performers would know exactly what was expected.
“This is a nightmare,” he said of asking actors to improvise their way through sex scenes.
“I don’t want to improv my way through this.”
Instead, he compared intimate-scene choreography to learning dance steps: actors know where they are moving, what is being shown and what needs to remain covered.
Consent before cameras roll
Tierney also said actors were given early versions of scripts and asked to confirm they were comfortable with what had been written before filming began.
That process meant decisions around nudity and physical intimacy were not being sprung on Williams or Storrie once they reached set.
For a series whose sex scenes became one of its biggest talking points, that behind-the-scenes approach matters.
Heated Rivalry has been praised by fans not only for its sexual frankness but for treating the relationship between Shane and Ilya as both intensely physical and emotionally significant.
Tierney’s comments suggest the goal was never simply to show as much skin as possible.
Even when the actors themselves were willing.
Full-frontal was apparently a step too far
Williams and Storrie have already spent plenty of season one wearing very little, with the show leaning confidently into queer male desire without treating sex as something that needs to happen off-screen.
But for Tierney, full-frontal nudity would not necessarily have added anything to those moments.
That distinction is useful in an era when “how explicit can we make this?” can sometimes become shorthand for progressive queer representation.
Sometimes the more interesting question is whether an intimate scene feels authentic, emotionally grounded and safe for the people performing it.
And apparently, Heated Rivalry managed all of that without going completely full monty.
For now, anyway.
