If Season 1 of Heated Rivalry gave us Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov — the most committed secret relationship in professional hockey — Season 2 is about to make things significantly more crowded. Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series spans seven novels, and the show’s second season is pulling from two of them: Tough Guy (Book 3) and Role Model (Book 5). That means four new queer hockey characters joining the ice, played by four actors with serious credentials and, in at least one case, an openly queer identity that makes the casting feel exactly right.
Production began in August 2026, with Season 2 expected to premiere in April 2027 on HBO Max in the U.S. and Crave in Canada. Here’s your guide to who’s joining the cast and who they’re playing.
Justice Smith as Harris Drover
Justice Smith — known for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and HBO’s Genera+ion, where he played Chester, a queer, gender-fluid teenager — has been cast as Harris Drover, one half of the central couple from Role Model (Book 5 of the Game Changers series).
In the books, Harris is an openly gay hockey player who’s comfortable with who he is — the kind of person who makes everyone around him feel like they can be themselves too. He’s the “role model” of the title, though he’d probably be the last person to call himself that. Smith publicly came out as queer during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, and has been outspoken about the importance of queer actors playing queer roles. His casting as an openly gay hockey player who becomes a beacon for someone still in the closet feels less like a casting decision and more like a statement of intent.
Charlie Gillespie as Troy Barrett
Charlie Gillespie — best known as Luke Patterson in Netflix’s Julie and the Phantoms, and recently in Totally Killer and One Night Only — plays Troy Barrett, Harris Drover’s counterpart in Role Model. Troy is a professional hockey player who gets traded to the Ottawa Centaurs, Ilya Rozanov’s new team. He’s closeted, terrified of what coming out would mean for his career, and deeply entangled with Harris as a result.
The dynamic between Harris and Troy is essentially the inverse of Shane and Ilya’s story: where Heated Rivalry explored two rival stars maintaining a secret relationship across teams, Role Model is about what happens when someone who’s out meets someone who can’t be. Gillespie, a Canadian actor from Dieppe, New Brunswick, brings the right mix of baby-faced charm and emotional vulnerability to a character who spends most of the book trying to convince himself he’s fine.
Daniel Diemer as Ryan Price
Daniel Diemer — a Canadian actor from Brentwood Bay, British Columbia, known for Netflix’s The Half of It and Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians (where he plays Tyson) — takes on Ryan Price from Tough Guy (Book 3). Ryan is an enforcer for the Toronto Guardians, a role that in hockey means your job is literally to fight people. He also struggles with anxiety and body image, which is a combination that sounds contradictory until you remember that the guys who hit hardest are often the ones fighting something internal at the same time.
Diemer’s casting makes geographic sense — he’s Canadian, the character is Canadian, and the show films in Canada — but it also makes emotional sense. In The Half of It, he played Paul, a sweet, awkward jock who slowly realizes the girl he’s helping woo someone else is the person he actually connects with. Ryan Price is a different character, but the throughline of “gentle giant who doesn’t know how to say what he feels” is very much in Diemer’s wheelhouse.
Shaheen Jafargholi as Fabian Salah
Shaheen Jafargholi — a Welsh actor from Swansea, known for EastEnders (as Shakil Kazemi), Casualty, and the BBC miniseries Lost Boys & Fairies (2024), where he played Celyn — rounds out the Season 2 additions as Fabian Salah, also from Tough Guy. Fabian is an aspiring musician who loathes hockey, which makes him the perfect counterweight to Ryan, a man whose entire identity is built around the sport. He also has a nontraditional physical presentation that challenges every assumption people — including Ryan — make about him.
Jafargholi’s casting is particularly interesting given his role in Lost Boys & Fairies, a queer Welsh drama that required him to explore non-masculine presentation on screen. Fabian Salah is a character who exists outside the conventional masculinity of the hockey world, and Jafargholi has already proven he can inhabit that space with nuance and conviction.
Edvin Ryding as Luca Haas
Edvin Ryding — the Swedish actor best known for playing Prince Wilhelm in Netflix’s Young Royals (2021–2024), and recently seen in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025) — has been cast as Luca Haas, a rookie right winger on the Ottawa Centaurs. Luca appears in The Long Game (Book 7 of the Game Changers series), the direct sequel to Heated Rivalry that follows Shane and Ilya’s story into its next chapter.
Luca is Swiss — a detail that’s already sparked discussion among fans, since Ryding is Swedish — and he’s a 2nd overall draft pick who scores in the Centaurs’ home opener despite the team losing. He’s young, talented, and adjusting to life in a new country, which gives Ryding plenty to work with. Rachel Reid reportedly spent two years writing a follow-up novel centered on Luca before ultimately scrapping it, so there’s clearly more to this character than the books have shown so far. The show may be where his story finally gets told.
Ryding’s casting brings serious star power to the ensemble. Young Royals made him a global name — he was featured on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe list — and his transition from Swedish royal drama to North American hockey romance suggests the show’s producers are investing in actors who can carry the emotional weight the source material demands. If you’ve seen Young Royals, you know Ryding specializes in playing young men who are simultaneously performing a version of themselves and falling apart behind it. That’s exactly what Luca Haas needs.
The Bigger Picture
What’s striking about these four additions is how they expand the show’s scope beyond Shane and Ilya’s love story without abandoning its core thesis: that queer men in professional hockey are not a monolith. Harris is out and at peace with it. Troy is closeted and terrified. Ryan is a fighter who can’t articulate his feelings. Fabian doesn’t care about hockey at all. Four characters, four relationships to masculinity, four different flavors of queerness — and four actors who bring real range to the ensemble.
Season 2 also adds Emily Hampshire, Robert Naylor, Sabrina Jalees, and Priyanka in supporting roles, rounding out what is becoming one of the most expansive queer ensemble casts on television. The show has already been renewed for a third season, with Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie signed on for three seasons total.
If Season 1 was about two people falling in love against the odds, Season 2 is about the world around them — the other queer players in the league, the different ways they navigate their identities, and the relationships that form when the pressure of the closet meets the relief of being seen. It’s a bigger, messier, more expansive story, and based on this cast, it’s going to be a very good one.
Heated Rivalry Season 2 is expected to premiere in April 2027 on HBO Max (US) and Crave (Canada). The Game Changers book series by Rachel Reid is available wherever books are sold.
Related reading
- Heated Rivalry Season 2: Filming Starts This Month, New Cast Revealed, and Everything We Know So Far
- Heated Rivalry Takes Over Boston
- Recap: 37th GLAAD Media Awards
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