Heated Rivalry Season 2 casting has brought in Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie as the new leads of the upcoming season, with Smith set to play Harris Drover and Gillespie cast as Troy Barrett. The second season is already in production in Canada and is set to premiere in spring 2027.
That makes this more than a routine addition to a returning TV drama. Smith arrives with credits that include the Jurassic World movie franchise and Netflix’s The Get Down, while Gillespie brings experience from Netflix’s Julie and the Phantoms. For fans of Heated Rivalry and Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, the appeal is immediate: two familiar names now front the next chapter of a show that already built an audience around Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.
The series is a Crave Original, and Season 1 arrived in late 2025 with its focus on Shane and Ilya. This next season keeps that story moving while also introducing Harris and Troy, which means the show is no longer staying inside a single romance. Instead, it is splitting its attention between two book-based threads, with one continuing from The Long Game and the other drawn from Role Model.
That split is where the new season gets interesting. Troy is not just another player on Ilya Rozanov’s team; he is a hockey player with a history of bullying, while Harris is the team’s cheerful social media manager. Those roles suggest a different kind of energy from the central pairing viewers already know, and they also hint at how much ground the season has to cover if it is trying to hold both storylines at once.
Jacob Tierney said Rachel Reid has created two layered characters in Harris and Troy who are easy to root for, and said the casting team wanted actors who could bring depth, heart, vulnerability and resilience to the screen. He said Smith and Gillespie do exactly that. The timing matters because production has already started, which means the show is now locked into the choices it has made for the next stage of the adaptation.
The real question is not whether the season has found its new leads. It is how much room the series will give Shane and Ilya while also making Harris and Troy matter on their own. With spring 2027 still ahead, the shape of Heated Rivalry Season 2 is already clear enough to know the show is widening, not just continuing.
