When Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney reached out to Peter Peter, the composer had never waded into the world of film and television scoring.
“It was pretty insane, especially for a first gig,” Peter tells The Hollywood Reporter about jumping right into the show on a Monday morning Zoom call.
Peter says Tierney and his “vibe” played a big role in why he felt he needed to take the job. “When we hopped on the first phone call, I totally got good vibes. At first I was like, he looks like the kind of guy that’s really fun to work with,” he says. “That was the first impression I got from him.”
The composer says he thought Heated Rivalry was edgy and thrilling when Tierney presented it to him, noting it would be the “best first project” he could imagine. He adds, “It wasn’t even a debate on saying yes or no. It was just a big yes.”
Heated Rivalry, produced by Bell Media for Canadian streamer Crave, airs on HBO Max in the U.S. It centers on the fictional hockey universe found in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, focusing on two rival professional players — Canada-born Shane Hollander (Williams) of the fictitious Montreal Metros and Russia-born Ilya Rozanov (Storrie) of the fictitious Boston Raiders. The series follows the pair as they navigate an increasingly complicated yet deeply romantic near-decade long secret affair.
Peter wasn’t sure of the timeline of the show given he had never worked on one, saying he questioned whether it’s even happening. Then he was told the show would be moving up its release. “My window just narrowed by half,” he jokes. “I realized how short and how narrow the window was, but I’m proud because I didn’t bail, I didn’t ditch. I did it. But it was a big challenge — not going to lie.”
Given this was his first scoring gig, he tried to plan based on the scripts he’d read. He says he wrote “lots and lots” of music, but ended up scrapping most of it once he saw the episodes. He planned for fast-paced, techo beats but ended up shifting to music based on “nice chord progressions” instead. “In the end it was all emotion based,” he says.
“[That type of music] was reflecting their love way better than just having a drum beat. Having a drum beat on a sex scene really felt — I mean there’s one in episode three that fit — but otherwise, for Shane and Ilya, [the music] needed to crawl in and expand but not be intrusive,” Peter explains. “A drumbeat, [I felt] right away [that] it wasn’t it. That’s terrible. It felt vulgar, it felt intrusive, so I decided to throw that down the drain.”
There certainly were times in the series where Peter was able to lean into that more upbeat, on the edge of your seat sound, like with “Inferno,” the track playing during the show’s second episode, where Shane and Ilya have a steamy hook up in a Las Vegas hotel room. “Sometimes I would pick up on a particular motion and the movement,” he says.
“I remember Shane does this thing where he puts his hand on his chest, and I really had fun at this very moment with the synth,” he explains. Anyone who’s seen the show knows exactly the moment and music cue Peter is speaking about, as it perfectly encapsulates the tension building between the two hockey players. “I wanted to put an emphasis on [that moment], but otherwise I didn’t want it to be too gimmicky,” he adds.
Peter says he was dedicated to getting the score right. ”I didn’t want the show to be my crash course of being a screen composer, so the emotion of a scene always [came] first,” he says. That’s clear when listening to the film’s soundtrack, which was released last month.
“I received lots of messages [about the show] and then the first day that it aired, I remember Brendan [Brady], the producer, writing me and saying let’s talk about the original soundtrack in the new year,” Peter recalls. “In the end, we didn’t have time for that.
It quickly became clear that Heated Rivalry was blowing up online and gaining a dedicated fanbase. Fans of the series began clamoring for any show content they could — including the music. “He contacted me right after and asked me if I could work on it during the holidays,” he says. “I’m very happy now it’s out there.”
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