"Heated Rivalry" Star Connor Storrie Shares He Learned Ice Skating and Russian for the Role

Actor Connor Storrie, who plays Russian hockey player Ilya Rozanov in the gay romance series Heated Rivalry, is giving fans the inside scoop on how he prepared for his role.

Just after midnight on January 13, Storrie made his late night TV debut on Late Night with Seth Meyers.

There, the two chatted about the show’s reception, Storrie’s newfound fame, and the path he took to get to where he is now.

While Storrie is now famous for playing a Russian hockey player, when he was offered the part, he lacked two important skills: the ability to speak Russian and the ability to ice skate.

Storrie revealed that he and his co-star, Hudson Williams, both had to undergo training on how to skate before filming began.

“These guys in the NHL, they have been skating since they were like three years old,” Storrie explained during the interview. “So for Hudson and I to show up with like two weeks of skating training and being like… just kind of waddling, like this, like it’s ridiculous.”

“Do you feel a little bit better at skating now? Because, I mean, it was not egregious,” Meyers then asked.

“I’m gonna be honest with you, I thought I was doing good, and then recently one of our costume designers, Hannah, posted this like BTS thing of me skating and I watched it and I was like ‘oh boy,’ I was like ‘I don’t deserve any accolades for this,’” he responded with a chuckle.

Meyers then explained that it can be tempting to assume that when a new actor does a really great job in their breakout role, it’s because they are very similar to their character. However, with Storrie, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“I fully just assumed they had found a Russian-speaking actor for this part. That is not what happened,” Meyers said during the interview. “Did you have any head start on Russian?”

Storrie then explained that in high school he was really into linguistics and tried to learn the Russian alphabet and got into listening to Russian rap music.

However, he still did not know how to speak the language before being cast on the show.

“Russian is so… it’s so impossibly difficult to learn,” Storrie said, before adding that he has asked the show’s creator Jacob Tierney to incorporate a scene in the future where he raps in Russian as an ode to his high school days.

“But it sounds like Russian was easier for you than the skating? Is that accurate?” Meyers then asked.

“I mean, the skating is just, it’s impossible, you know?” Storrie said. “Like I could do it every single day for 10 years and I would never be anywhere close to that. The Russian was a little bit more immediate and was a little bit more a part of the show for me. Yeah, so I mean, I did like four hour sessions of Russian every day for like a month and a half.”

However, it seems all of those Russian tutoring sessions paid off.

In addition to the audience buying his performance, extras on set for the scenes set in Russia also assumed Storrie was a native speaker after hearing him say his lines.

“A lot of the scenes that took place in Russia, almost all of the background [actors] were Russian,” Storrie explained. “This Russian lady, this older lady, I came back in to reset [the scene] and she starts being like [speaking Russian], and then I’m like ‘no, I don’t do that!’”

In the comments of the interview on YouTube, fans also praised Storrie for how realistic his acting skills were.

“Me as a Russian native speaker had the same idea as the Russian lady. I had to look him up in order to realize that he isn’t in fact someone who’s bilingual but doesn’t speak Russian a lot. I have younger cousins who sound a lot like him. He acted the sh** out of Ilya,” one commenter said.

“I sent a Russian friend an audio clip of Ilya chewing out his brother at the funeral. He said ‘Great job. 8 out of 10.’ The demands of learning lines plus learning Russian plus learning how to skate– all in such a short period — is mind-blowing. That’s dedication, folks!👏👏👏” another commenter added.