Spoilers for Heated Rivalry ahead. Heated Rivalry fans aren’t the only people who were convinced by Connor Storrie’s fake Russian accent. During his Jan. 12 appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, the star revealed that he accidentally fooled an extra on the set of his hit Crave and HBO Max series into believing that he actually spoke Russian fluently.
During the interview, Storrie, who plays Russian-born hockey star Ilya Rozanov, explained that the mix-up happened while filming scenes that took place in his character’s home country. “Oddly enough, almost all the background [actors] were Russian,” he explained. “The scene where, after my dad’s funeral — spoiler — I’m with my brother, everyone at that table was actually Russian.”
In the scene, Ilya argues with his older brother Alexei (Slavic Rogozine) at the funeral reception, before returning to the dinner table. When Storrie was preparing for his next take, a Russian extra attempted to speak to him in her native language, confusing the actor.
“This Russian lady, this older lady, I came back in to reset, and she starts [speaking Russian],” he recalled. “And then I’m like, ‘No, I don’t… I don’t do that.’”
The lady was shocked that Storrie couldn’t understand her and consulted one of her fellow Russian extras. “Then she told the person next to her, she was [speaking in Russian] and then this man was like, ‘Oh, she thought you were an actual Russian speaker,’” he said, before clarifying that she assumed “my parents were Russian and I speak Russian at home with a pseudo-American accent.”
Connor’s Russian Training
Despite fooling a Russian native, Storrie himself did not speak any Russian before landing the role in Heated Rivalry. In December, he told Teen Vogue that he took four-hour lessons for three weeks leading up to filming, and he kept practicing after arriving on set.
“It was about time and consistency,” he told Behind the Blinds in a separate interview. “The moment I got out of the car on set, I started speaking with the accent to all the PAs, all the ADs, hair, makeup, and wardrobe people. I stayed in it until the last cut of the day. Not because I was ‘in character,’ but because it gave me an hour and a half to warm up.”
Storrie mastered the accent so well that not only did he trick an extra, but he had to actually learn a phrase in the language to explain himself. “I always say in Russian, ‘I speak Russian really poorly,’” he joked to Meyers.
