‘Heated Rivalry’ Stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams Talk Hockey, Sex Scenes, and Overnight Success

“We’re definitely objectified,” Storrie later admits. “I signed up knowing that would be a part of it. I really did not think my butt would be such a topic of conversation. I thought it would be more of a general, like, Oh, these guys really get into it on the show.” Still, his friends have taken to screenshotting Tweets and sharing them, explaining: “It’s usually GIFs of my butt from the shower.” As Rachel Reid later tells me from her home in Nova Scotia: “I kind of love that this is what people are into this Hallmark season.”

Storrie, 25, grew up in Odessa, Texas, the town made famous by Buzz Bissinger’s book, Friday Night Lights. Storrie didn’t play football, but he was a competitive tumbler. He describes his home town as “high desert, super flat, super dry, kind of white trash, which I love.”

“My dad was in the mortgage business,” he continues. Both of his parents were, before the crash. “Then my mom got into managing buildings for dementia and Alzheimer’s [patients]. My dad started doing land deals for oil companies.” Storrie’s family moved around a lot. The one constant was acting. “I wanted to be an actor as long as I can remember. My mom says that it’s one of the first coherent sentences I said. I was like, ‘I’m going to be in movies.’” He isn’t exaggerating; obsessive Heated Rivalry fans recently uncovered his childhood YouTube channel, in which a wide eyed, 12-year-old Storrie reveals his username is “Actorboy222.”

When Storrie was in high school, his family moved to the Conejo Valley near Ventura, California, about a 90-minute drive from Hollywood. His parents had split up by this point, and Storrie spent his junior year of high school studying abroad in France. He had long hair and a septum piercing, loved languages, and wanted “to get lost in a different culture,” he says, before emphasizing that he was a teenager. “At 16, you’re not like, ‘I need to make this leap, it’s going to fortify my relationship to the world.’ I was just kind of like, ‘This sounds frickin’ badass.’”