Exclusive Interview
‘Heated Rivalry’s Charlie Gillespie Spills on His Hockey History Ahead of Season 2
Though he’s new to the world of Heated Rivalry, Charlie Gillespie is no stranger to the ice. The actor will appear as Troy Barrett in Season 2 of the Crave hockey romance, bringing to life another main character — and gay pro hockey player — from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series.
Gillespie grew up playing hockey in New Brunswick, Canada. Heated Rivalry isn’t even his first time using his hockey skills for an acting gig: He starred in last year’s coming-of-age sports drama Shattered Ice. He didn’t need a double for his on-ice scenes in Heated Rivalry Season 2, the actor tells Swooon while promoting Sidelined 3: End Game, but he was given one anyway.
“You gotta make sure that no one’s breaking a leg,” the 28-year-old explains. “I can take a check. It’s not a scary thing for me, but for people who don’t play, it can be a very threatening experience. It can be a rough game, but I’ve been playing hockey forever since I was a little kid.”
Gillespie stands apart in that way from costars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, who lead show as Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, and didn’t have hockey experience beforehand. Their continued romance will be adapted from Reid’s The Long Game, which features Gillespie’s Troy as a secondary character and new player on the dysfunctional Ottawa Centaurs, which Ilya captains to live closer to Shane.
In a twist of fate, hockey is what got Gillespie into acting in the first place as a little kid. “I didn’t even really under understand the game yet,” he recalls. “I’m going out on the ice and I’m doing air guitar and I’m pretending like I’m rocking out to a concert for the whole crowd, and then eventually the coach was like talking to my mom [and] was like, ‘Hey, we gotta figure this out.'”
His mom sat him down one night and explained the mechanics of the game, drawing the rink on paper and walking him through all the positions on the ice. “And then she pulled out a pamphlet for the Capitol Theater back home, and she’s like, ‘And that other stuff that you like doing, this might be a really fun place for you to go explore that,'” he says. “And so then every Saturday morning, I started doing theater.”
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Theater was a place that he could explore emotions that he “couldn’t exactly safely express in certain other places.” The Julie and the Phantoms alum adds, “Theater was complete freedom. Theater was, the second you walked through that door, you were accepted for who you were, no matter what, and you were even encouraged to even find deeper versions of what you identify as.”
“My mom, she really lined that up properly,” he says. “If I didn’t have a parent that was paying attention to who I was differently, then maybe I would have just gotten somebody saying ‘Stop that. Only do this.’ So I’m fortunate, but those blessings come in so many… I’m so lucky for the people that I’ve crossed in my life and that have encouraged me and helped me out. I owe it to a library worth of names.”
Gillespie was well aware of the cultural impact of Heated Rivalry before he was cast as Troy. “Yeah, that show was everywhere that I saw,” he explains. “I kept on getting calls from people like, ‘Hey, you should be on this.’ I’m like, ‘I know, I would love to.’ I wasn’t buying those books prior, but I’ve gone through them all now.”
He adds, “I love [that] our author is from Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia is just a 45-minute drive from where I grew up. We’re neighbors, and getting to see names that I recognize on jerseys, like names that you’ll never see in movies past… They’re all like East Coast Acadian names. You see them in Louisiana, and you see them at home.”
Gillespie recalls going into the locker room on set of Season 2, and seeing the last names of his two best friends growing up, Arseneau and Boudreau, on two jerseys hanging next to each other. “It felt like they were my friends were there in the room with me,” he says. “But then it also felt just like, ‘Wow, like we get to do something that’s Canadian.'”
His past jobs — playing the ghostly love interest in Julie and the Phantoms and the rival love interest in movies like Sidelined and One Night Only — have prepared him for his next chapter. In Reid’s books, Troy falls in love with the Centaurs’ social media manager, Harris (Justice Smith). Their full story is told in Role Model, which has an overlapping timeline with The Long Game. Creator Jacob Tierney has confirmed their secondary couple status, much like Scott (François Arnaud) and Kip (Robbie G.K) in Season 1.
“You’re like a baseball player, right?” he says. “Even though you’re on a different team, you just got to make sure that you’re set in what you can do. I’m so excited for all the upcoming journeys, and I’m looking forward to telling more stories. I love love interest stories. I would love to [play] a parent. I would love to be a brother. If you can do projects with love… then you have something that I think still translates to everybody, but then you have an important quality that you’re adding to your character, and so hopefully more to love. You know what I mean? Just love all around.”
Gillespie notes that it’s even more of a blessing to incorporate the things that he loves, music and hockey, into acting. “I learn so much from the movies that I make,” he tells Swooon. “Every single one has something that it’s like, the universe is being funny because like they’re like, ‘Oh, you don’t want to learn this in your own life? OK, here’s a whole movie about it,’ and then tell me that you’re not going to learn the lesson, right?”
He continues, “I’m really, really lucky. I just want to keep making things, right? I want to tell different stories. Like my favorites are like musicals and and things like Mrs. Doubtfire and things like Adam Sandler comedies, and then also really serious pieces like Les Miserables. I think, as an actor, you try to have a range of different things and try to be able to fit in all the boxes. But everything that I’m doing, I’m counting as a blessing for sure.”
Sidelined 3: End Game, Movie Premiere, November 26, Tubi
Heated Rivalry, Season 2, TBA 2027, Crave and HBO Max
