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As Emily Hampshire joins the Season 2 ensemble of Heated Rivalry, she already has a history with the Crave/HBO Max series.

Noting her longtime friendship with series creator Jacob Tierney, the actress explained that she received “special thanks” in the credits of the Season 1 finale after lending her voice to an awards show scene in the episode “Olympians”, calling Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) to the stage.

“I couldn’t believe the fandom of this show were able to pick that out, that I was that voice, when I didn’t say anything,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s tiny. I announced something at some award show.”

Hampshire added, “Jacob Tierney, who created the show, is my oldest and best friend. I did his first short, all his movies. He got ordained online and performed my wedding ceremony. I walked down the aisle to ‘I’ll Believe in Anything’, which is the song that he has made famous in this show. So we go back a long way, and I always read everything he does. So I read Heated Rivalry before anyone else did.”

In August, Hampshire was cast in Season 2 of Heated Rivalry, playing sex toy reviewer Vanessa, a friend of Fabian Salah (Shaheen Jafargholi) in Rachel Reid’s third Game Changer book Tough Guy.

Production began on the sophomore season of Tierney’s Crave Original series adaptation in Canada in August.

In addition to Hampshire and Jafargholi, Deadline recently reported that Justice Smith, Charlie Gillespie, Daniel Diemer, Edvin Ryding, Robert Naylor, Sabrina Jalees, Priyanka, Brendan Morgan, David Tomlinson, Gerry Dee, Michelle Mylett, Lauren Chan and Nick Stahl have been cast in Season 2, which is set to premiere in spring 2027.