Highlights
- Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie join Heated Rivalry Season 2 as Harris and Troy.
- The duo joins stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie for the HBO Max hit.
- Season 2 premieres spring 2027, adapting Rachel Reid’s Role Model and The Long Game.
The rink is getting a new power couple.
Heated Rivalry has officially cast Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie for Season 2 of the buzzy queer hockey romance, with Smith stepping into the role of Harris Drover and Gillespie landing the part of Troy Barrett.
The pair join returning stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, who play central couple Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, as the new season heads into production.
Smith, known for I Saw the TV Glow and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, and Gillespie, a Julie and the Phantoms alum, will play the leads of Rachel Reid‘s novel Role Model, the fifth book in her Game Changers series on which the Crave hit is based.
Gillespie’s Troy is a hockey player traded from the Toronto Guardians to the Ottawa Centaurs, while Smith’s Harris serves as the Centaurs’ social media manager.
Showrunner Jacob Tierney and executive producer Brendan Brady gushed over the casting in a joint statement, saying, “Rachel Reid has given us two beautifully layered characters in Harris and Troy who you can’t help but root for.”
“From the start of the casting process, we knew we were looking for actors who could create something truly special together and bring that same depth and heart to the screen,” they continued.
“Justice and Charlie do exactly that,” they added. “They immediately connected with the vulnerability and resilience at the core of these characters, bringing an instinctive understanding of who Harris and Troy are.”
Tierney has also teased that the new season is heading into “much more serious territory” for the beloved franchise.
Season 2 will draw partly from Role Model while continuing Shane and Ilya’s arc through Reid’s sixth novel, The Long Game, which finds the pair navigating a committed relationship while still hiding their romance from the public eye.
Tierney explained the sequencing of the adaptation back at BookCon in April, noting, “Part of the reason you start off with Heated Rivalry, as far as adapting goes, is because you want to get to The Long Game … because The Long Game is an emotionally sophisticated book that takes this couple seriously.”
He added that while the show pulls from several installments of Reid’s series, “Ilya and Shane are the heartbeat” of the story.
The series, produced by Accent Aigu Entertainment for Bell Media’s Crave, is distributed internationally by Sphere Abacus and airs stateside on HBO Max.
Mike Goldbach is on board as a co-writer for the new season.
Production on Season 2 kicked off this week in Canada, with the premiere confirmed for spring 2027.
Heated Rivalry became a breakout hit after its first season, which adapted the second Game Changers book, and the show has continued to build a devoted fan base ahead of its highly anticipated sophomore run.
