Connor Storrie, the Heated Rivalry actor the Emmys could only nominate for SNL

Connor Storrie

Photo: TKA201 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 22, 2000 Aurora, Colorado, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Joker: Folie à Deux
Awards	ACTRA (shared)

The performance that made Connor Storrie famous was never allowed near an Emmy ballot. As Ilya Rozanov, the cocky Russian hockey star of Heated Rivalry, he carried a Canadian series that HBO Max turned into a fan phenomenon, yet the Television Academy’s rules kept the show out of the race because its money came from Canada. When his nomination finally arrived, it was for something else entirely: one night hosting Saturday Night Live. The distance between the work that built his name and the work the industry was able to reward is the question his career is now trying to answer.

He came to Ilya with almost none of the character’s skills. He could not skate and did not speak Russian when the offer came, and he was waiting tables at the Laurel Grill in Culver City, close to losing that job, according to Variety. He learned enough Russian to build the accent from the inside. In the chemistry reads he backed Hudson Williams, the third actor he read with, for the part of Shane Hollander, and Jacob Tierney’s adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels ended up resting on that pairing.

The road to that audition ran through three states. Storrie was born in Aurora, Colorado, on February 22, 2000, to parents who both worked in the mortgage business, and he grew up in Odessa, Texas, where a performing arts school and competitive tumbling gave him a first stage and a first discipline. A teenage move to Southern California put him at Westlake High School, with a junior year spent studying in France. In Los Angeles he took improv classes at The Groundlings and studied clowning, training he has credited with teaching him how to stay open when a scene turns difficult.

The early credits were the usual apprenticeship of short films and web series, starting in 2018. His first feature, Riley, cast him as Liam Hauser in a queer coming-of-age sports drama, which reads in hindsight like a rehearsal for the show that would change his life. In Joker: Folie à Deux he played the young Arkham inmate who surfaces in the film’s final scene, a few minutes of screen time that he later found himself explaining in interviews as fans argued over what the ending meant.

Heated Rivalry premiered on Crave in Canada and on HBO Max in the United States in November 2025, six episodes built on a secret relationship between two rival hockey captains. Critics singled out his Ilya, a man who hides tenderness behind bravado and a thick accent, and the Television Critics Association nominated him for Individual Achievement in Drama. The fandom grew loud enough that the production company later asked people to keep their distance from filming locations. Storrie and Williams carried the partnership into audio, voicing rival fae princes in the romantasy series Ember & Ice for the platform Quinn.

The awards season showed how fragile that kind of success looks on paper. Because Heated Rivalry was financed in Canada and HBO Max joined only as a distributor, the series did not qualify for the Primetime Emmys, which require an American co-production in place before cameras roll; it was submitted to the International Emmys and missed there too. At home the show did win: its cast took the ACTRA Toronto award for series ensemble. His Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, came from hosting Saturday Night Live on February 28, 2026. He was the only host of the season to be nominated, and he did not win at the Creative Arts ceremony in September, where he walked the carpet with his mother. There is a second problem the trophies cannot fix. Much of the coverage still treats him as half of a couple, his name rarely printed without Williams’ beside it, and the heartthrob label sits awkwardly on an actor trained as a clown whose choices since then lean toward discomfort.

His first answer was to make his own film before anyone could define him. Just before the Heated Rivalry press tour he wrapped Transaction Planet, a micro-budget feature he wrote and directed and shot entirely on an iPhone. It still has no release date.

The offers since then have pulled him in several directions. He joined the ensemble of Peaked, Molly Gordon’s comedy for A24. In May and June he shot Craig Zobel’s thriller Turpentine in the Atlanta area opposite Melissa McCarthy, a project produced by Rian Johnson‘s company T-Street. Halina Reijn then cast him in Please, her period film for A24 led by Gracie Abrams, with David Jonsson and Tom Burke also aboard. On television, a planned single episode of Criminal Minds grew into a four-episode arc as Lance Kingston in the show’s nineteenth season after showrunner Erica Messer saw what he did with the part.

Over the summer he played Marco, the blind date of Billie Eilish’s Esther Greenwood, in Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Sylvia Plath‘s The Bell Jar for Focus Features, with Carey Mulligan in the cast. Production wrapped in September, and the film has no release date yet.

Ilya is not finished with him. The second season of Heated Rivalry started shooting in Toronto during the summer, with Williams back as Shane. On October 27, 2026, Deadline reported that Storrie is in talks for a co-lead role opposite Ryan Gosling in Marvel Studios‘ Ghost Rider, directed by Shawn Levy, reportedly as the villain; Marvel declined to comment and no deal has been announced. If it closes, the actor whose defining role the Emmys could not see will walk into the biggest studio machine in Hollywood carrying an accent he learned on the job.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, Saturday Night Live, Melissa McCarthy, Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie, Heated Rivalry, Jacob Tierney, Joker: Folie à Deux

Featured News — Connor Storrie

Movies

Ryan Gosling’s Ghost Rider may get a Heated Rivalry villain as Marvel circles Connor Storrie

TV Shows

Heated Rivalry turned Crave into a buyer magnet, and Hudson Williams’ Yaga is the next test

Movies

‘Heated Rivalry’ Season 2: Why the Internet Cast Justice Smith Before the Show Did

See all →

Related People

Hudson Williams

Kit Connor

Justice Smith

Hiroshi Ishikawa

Katherine McNamara

Scott Derrickson