Connor Storrie is an Emmy nominee. The phrase shouldn’t be all that surprising to Heated Rivalry fans. We knew, from early on in the run of the show, that he was talented enough. The problem, of course, was that Heated Rivalry is not a US production, and as such was not eligible for the Emmys.
In a cruel twist of fate, since Connor Storrie isn’t Canadian, he also wasn’t available for the Canadian Screen Awards, which his co-star Hudson Williams won, and in which the show also won big, deservedly so.
Nonetheless, we can say that Connor Storries is an Emmy nominee, all thanks to Saturday Night Live. That’s right, Storrie hosted the show after his breakout role in Heated Rivalry, and is now nominated in the Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series category.
Just to give this the dimension it deserves. Eight months ago, we didn’t know who Connor Storrie was. He’d already filmed Heated Rivalry, and he’d already filmed his guest arc on Criminal Minds: Evolution, but we hadn’t seen those. Heated Rivalry already had a release date, but HBO hadn’t even acquired the rights. As someone who’d read the book and was excited for the adaptation, I remember wondering, like many others, how I’d even be able to watch it.
Then, HBO stepped in to buy the US rights, the show became a massive success, and the rest is history. But the fact that the history includes Storrie hosting SNL in February, just a couple of months after the final episode of Heated Rivalry was released, is wild to begin with. Sure, TV is a business, and will always try to capitalize on the ‘big’ thing. Storrie and co-star Williams were the big thing at the time.
But hosting SNL is a very complicated endeavour. It’s not just showing up one day, reading some jokes, and that’s it. Instead, hosting SNL is a week-long gig, a grueling one, with many hours of work. The best hosts bring their own ideas into it, pitch their own sketches. They also typically collaborate with the writers, providing input or helping brainstorm.
Then there’s the table read of something like 40 to 50 sketches, when the best are selected. Yes, that’s how many sketches are typically prepared. Only a few make it in, but the work is there. Once the chosen sketches are picked, they have to be refined, and then comes rehearsal, or what they call pre-tapes. And a final rehearsal in front of a live audience. Because the thing is, SNL is live comedy. And that’s hard.
You need to understand comedic timing. You need to understand the rhythm of a crowd. You need to know when to pause and when to push through. And you definitely need to know how to pivot if something goes wrong. A lot of people do stand-up comedy and cannot do SNL. A lot of people are good dramatic actors, but don’t have the ability to translate that to sketch comedy.
And yet, Connor Storrie came into this only three months from the release of Heated Rivalry and absolutely killed it. Don’t believe me, believe the Television Academy, which nominated him for an Emmy. In other words, believe Connor‘s peers. They were the ones who thought his performance was good enough.
Some might say this is a little bit of payment for the fact that he cannot be nominated for Heated Rivalry, and couldn’t be nominated for the Canadian Screen Awards. But the skills that make Ilya Rozanov a compelling character that we fell in love with have absolutely nothing to do with the skills that make you a good SNL host.
He didn’t earn this being dark and brooding, but deep down, soft Ilya Rozanov. He earned this by knocking that SNL hosting job out of the park. Even if it’s true that he probably wouldn’t have been on that stage in the first place if it weren’t for Heated Rivalry.
So, if anything, let’s think of it as a bit of karmic justice. Storrie absolutely deserved a nomination for Heated Rivalry. In a world where the show is produced in the US, I think he absolutely gets it. Because he gave us an Ilya that, even when he was an ass, was such a tender and vulnerable character. Because he, at times, seemed to have embodied an actual Russian hockey player. And because we believed every second of the romance between Ilya and Shane.
Look at the TCA Awards. Look at the GALECA Awards. The critics think Storrie deserves it, and his peers who nominated him for SNL would have surely nominated him for Heated Rivalry. He couldn’t get that. He gets this one, and he absolutely deserves it.
Fantastic article but you forgot to mention that on top of all that Connor had to carry the burden of being the peacemaker after the US hockey teams political nightmare post Winter Olympics. He handled it like a champion!