A few months ago Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams were both working as waiters. Now they are the stars of Heated Rivalry, one of the most talked about shows in the world.
Adapted from a novel by Canadian author Rachel Reid, who writes sexually explicit queer romance novels about hockey players, Heated Rivalry chronicles a forbidden love affair between two rival ice hockey players.
The show was not an obvious runaway hit. It was created and produced in Canada on a minimal budget - reportedly less than C$5m ($3.6m; £2.6m) per episode. Its six episodes were filmed in Ontario in just over a month, with a cast lead mostly by unknowns.
But since its debut in North America last November, Storrie, who plays Russian player Ilya Rozanov, and Williams, who plays Canadian Shane Hollander, have wracked up millions of fans, acted as torchbearers ahead of the Milan winter Olympics and appeared on a host of late night TV shows.
Storrie is set to host Saturday Night Live at the end of this month, while Williams - who reportedly still lives with his mum in Vancouver - recently shared a stage with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at an Ottawa film industry event.
I was just talking with one of my agents yesterday, and she said Connor and I have had to learn what a lot of actors get in five years, in like 30 days, Williams, who plays Hollander, told the Shut Up Evan podcast last month.
But its explosion into the zeitgeist since its debut last November has propelled its cast - and the people behind the scenes - into the stratosphere. Its penultimate episode has broken records to tie with Breaking Bad for the highest-rated episode ever on entertainment website IMDB. Now streaming in the UK and across the globe, the show's runaway success has the potential to reshape the television landscape.
We feel like proud mommas, says Jenny Lewis, one of the casting directors who found Storrie and Williams.
Working alongside her co-casting director Sara Kay, she tells the BBC they had just three months to find their stars, with the added complication of a very detailed checklist. There were all these stipulations - [comfortable with] sexual content, [doing] accents or other languages, skating, [being] good looking, athletic, Lewis says.
The show's producer Jacob Tierney told Toronto-based Kay and Lewis that he wanted the characters to remain faithful to the original source material, which had a passionate fan base. What Tierney wanted to do was an incredibly faithful adaptation of this novel, wildly faithful - faithful to a degree I don't think anybody ever imagined, says Myles McNutt, an associate professor of media studies at Old Dominion University.
Crave tapped into this fan base to help promote the show - and secure international distribution, with HBO Max and Sky bringing it to the US and UK respectively.
The show is the complete antithesis to what is happening in the rest of the streaming world, where Hollywood's biggest actors are regularly cast in high-budget productions designed for the small screen. Lewis and Kay hope they've set a new precedent when it comes to giving unknown actors a chance.
With a significant shift in narrative and representation, Heated Rivalry continues to capture the hearts of audiences everywhere and has fans eagerly awaiting the next chapter.
