Heated Rivalry season 2 casting bombshell as fan-favorite actor exits talks: report

Heated Rivalry season two is going into production this August with Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams returning as Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander. The second season will expand the world and introduce TV fans to characters such as Troy Barrett, Harris Drover, and Wyatt Hayes, and Jacob Tierney and the team behind the show have been making big casting decisions.

Fancasting for Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series has been taking place online for a long time, and there’s been a big push for Canadian actor Jack Innanen to take on the role of Troy, a hockey player with a nasty reputation, or Wyatt, a backup goaltender who is also traded. Jack himself revealed earlier in 2026 that he had been in conversations with the Heated Rivalry team.

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However, a new report seems to have closed the door officially on hopes that Jack would join the cast, with Entertainment Weekly reporting that Jack was offered a role, but was “unable to accept due to production conflicts”.

HELLO! has contacted Bell Media for comment.

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Jack is expected to go into production on season two of the Dan Levy- and Rachel Sennott-created Big Mistakes, a Netflix crime-comedy, also this summer.

Although the report does not indicate which character he was offered, knowing what Jacob has shared about season two, it seems likely that the offer was for Troy, the lead of the 2021 novel Role Model, and the type of role that would require an actor to spend more time in production.

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“There is an easy, facile way of looking at Role Model,” Jacob said during a panel at BookCon in New York City. “It’s very ‘grumpy sunshine.’ It’s very ‘apple orchard.’ It can drift into things that you want, but Troy is a really damaged guy. And Troy is quite damaged on the show. I would say we’re digging into that even harder.”

In Role Model, which follows the same timeline as 2022’s The Long Game, Troy is traded from the Toronto Guardians to the Ottawa Centaurs after a fight with a teammate. 

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With his new team, it emerges there is more to Troy than meets the eye as he struggles to overcome his own complicity in the league’s toxic masculinity while discovering his own sexuality.

Season two of Heated Rivalry is expected to follow the events of The Long Game. 

However, season one ended before the conclusion of the book it was based on, and fans have long speculated that season two may keep a tight focus on the book’s final epilogue and The Long Game’s opening chapters, diving deeper into Shane’s coming out with his team and the formation of the Irina Foundation during the 2018/2019 season.

Narrowing the time frame of season two would allow Jacob to spend time broadening the world to include characters readers met in Role Model and 2020’s Tough Guy, including Ryan Price and Fabian Salah.