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Where was Heated Rivalry filmed? Behind the scenes of the runaway success love story
Every epic romance needs its stage, but the Canadian phenomenon Heated Rivalry built an entire global arena. The television series, which has quickly moved from queer TikTok to just about everywhere beyond and spawned a thousand “meeting at the cottage” memes in the process, follows rival hockey stars Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov as they navigate a narrative that’s part coming-of-age saga, part fever dream in which Toronto masquerades as Manhattan, Hamilton doubles for Russia. The distance between desire and disclosure is measured in hotel room upgrades. Based on Rachel Reid’s beloved novels, the show became appointment viewing by doing what prestige TV often forgets: it let its heroes actually be happy, eventually.
Where was Heated Rivalry filmed?
Their story unfolds through borrowed skylines and rented suites, employing Ontario’s chameleonic landscape to construct what showrunner Jacob Tierney calls “the land of professional athletes who make millions of dollars.” That money was always part of the love story. When Tierney and production designer Aidan Leroux first mapped out the show’s visual journey, they weren’t just thinking about where these characters would share a kiss, and considerably more, they were thinking about what those rooms would cost. “We were acutely aware that we were making a Harlequin romance here,” Tierney tells Condé Nast Traveller. “This should not feel gritty, this should not feel especially real.” Leroux’s guiding principle was a gradual trickling in of opulence, not instant wealth. When we first meet Shane and Ilya, they’re 18, grinding it out in the junior leagues of Regina, Saskatchewan, all concrete walls and starkness. Leroux deliberately withheld the designer sunglasses and luxury watches, introducing them gradually as the characters aged into sponsorship deals and seven-figure contracts.
Ontario’s ability to play dress-up became the show’s secret weapon, though some costumes needed serious tailoring. The most iconic “elsewhere” moments were constructed on Toronto-area stages using LED volume technology, those virtual production walls usually reserved for intergalactic space operas, not midnight panoramas of the Vegas Strip. Few examples existed of the technology being used for intimate, traditional settings – most references were car commercials. So they started early, months before shooting officially began in March 2025, discovering that romance required a completely different set of physics than science fiction.
Distance was everything, Tierney explains. “The softer you can play that in focus,” he says, “the better it’s gonna be.” They weren’t chasing photorealism but coherence, the ability to leap from prairie industrial chill to Vegas fever-pitch neon without 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 visual arc deliberately eschewed subtlety. Leroux pitched it as moving from “bleak, almost black and white to Vegas, the most colourful electric place on Earth,” a connection Tierney admits he’d missed until Leroux spelt it out. That trajectory became the show’s emotional blueprint: start with the raw hunger of early career and longing, then escalate through ever more elaborate surfaces, tracking ambition through thread counts and skyline views.
