Every epic romance wants its stage, however the Canadian phenomenon Heated Rivalry constructed a complete international enviornment. The tv sequence, which has shortly moved from queer TikTok to only about in all places past and spawned a thousand “meeting at the cottage” memes in the method, follows rival hockey stars Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov as they navigate a story that is half coming-of-age saga, half fever dream in which Toronto masquerades as Manhattan, Hamilton doubles for Russia. The distance between want and disclosure is measured in resort room upgrades. Based on Rachel Reid’s beloved novels, the present grew to become appointment viewing by doing what status TV typically forgets: it let its heroes truly be completely happy, finally.
Where was Heated Rivalry filmed?
Their story unfolds by means of borrowed skylines and rented suites, using Ontario‘s chameleonic panorama to assemble what showrunner Jacob Tierney calls “the land of professional athletes who make millions of dollars.” That cash was all the time a part of the love story. When Tierney and manufacturing designer Aidan Leroux first mapped out the present’s visible journey, they weren’t simply serious about the place these characters would share a kiss, and significantly extra, they had been serious about what these rooms would value. “We were acutely aware that we were making a Harlequin romance here,” Tierney tells Condé Nast Traveler. “This should not feel gritty, this should not feel especially real.” Leroux’s tenet was a gradual trickling in of opulence, not prompt wealth. When we first meet Shane and Ilya, they’re 18, grinding it out in the junior leagues of Regina, Saskatchewan, all concrete partitions and starkness. Leroux intentionally withheld the designer sun shades and luxurious watches, introducing them regularly because the characters aged into sponsorship offers and seven-figure contracts.
Heated Rivalry (L to R) – Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander, Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov, Dylan Walsh as David Hollander and Christina Chang as Yuna Hollander in Episode 106 of Heated Rivalry. Cr. Sabrina Lantos © 2025Sabrina Lantos/Warner Brothers
Ontario’s skill to play dress-up grew to become the present’s secret weapon, although some costumes wanted critical tailoring. The most iconic “elsewhere” moments had been constructed on Toronto-area levels utilizing LED quantity expertise, these digital manufacturing partitions normally reserved for intergalactic house operas, not midnight panoramas of the Vegas Strip. Few examples existed of the expertise getting used for intimate, conventional settings—most references had been automobile commercials. So they began early months earlier than taking pictures formally started in March 2025, discovering that romance required fully completely different physics than science fiction. Distance was the whole lot Tierney explains. “The softer you can play that in focus,” he says, “the better it’s gonna be.” They weren’t chasing photorealism however coherence, the flexibility to leap from prairie industrial chill to Vegas fever-pitch neon with out breaking the spell. “Once an audience is bought in, they will adjust to a lot of things,” he says. “What it will not adjust to is being taken in and out of these moments.” The visible arc intentionally eschewed subtlety. Leroux pitched it as transferring from “bleak, almost black and white to Vegas, the most colorful electric place on Earth,” a connection Tierney admits he’d missed till Leroux spelled it out. That trajectory grew to become the present’s emotional blueprint: begin with the uncooked starvation of early profession and longing, then escalate by means of ever-more-elaborate surfaces, monitoring ambition by means of thread counts and skyline views.