'Heated Rivalry' Season 2 Casts the Couple from Third Book

Season 2 of Heated Rivalry has added two new cast members. According to Variety, Daniel Diemer and Shaheen Jafargholi have joined the series and will play Ryan Price and Fabian Salah, respectively.

Crave and HBO Max have not yet made any details about the characters official, but we do know that Ryan and Fabian are the main couple in Tough Guy, the third book in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series.

Season 2, however, will be based on The Long Game, the sixth book in the collection, released in 2022.

In the books, Ryan is a Canadian hockey player who moves through different teams and deals with anxiety and self-esteem issues. Fabian, meanwhile, is an openly gay Lebanese-Canadian indie musician.

Diemer is known for works such as Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the Netflix film The Half of It. Jafargholi, meanwhile, appeared in the second season of The Agency on Paramount+ and will also be in War, which premieres in October on HBO Max.

Everything you need to know about season 2 of Heated Rivalry

The hit series is based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers books.

In the plot of Season 2, Troy (Charlie Gillespie) is a hockey player trying to overcome a past marked by bullying, while Harris (Justice Smith) works as a social media manager. Their story will be told alongside the return of Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), the leads from the first season. Emily Hampshire, Edvin Ryding, Robert Naylor, Sabrina Jalees, and Priyanka Chopra are also part of the cast.

The second season will be based on the book The Long Game—the only other book in the Game Changers series featuring the same protagonists as Heated Rivalry—and will also adapt Role Model. The production also confirmed that the new episodes will premiere in spring 2027 in North America (late March through June).