Connor Storrie’s pre-Heated Rivalry film April X streaming in matter of days
April X will be available to stream. (Vertigo Releasing)
Before Connor Storrie took to the ice in Heated Rivalry, he starred in April X, a film that will soon available to stream at home.
Storrie has become a global superstar alongside Hudson Williams as they portrayed rivals-to-lovers ice hockey stars. However, before this big break, he starred in Michel K Parandi’s dystopian sci-fi thriller.
The film’s synopsis reads: “When his twin sister April (Lilly Krug) goes missing, Bax (Connor Storrie) searches every corner of their futuristic, post-Soviet cityscape to find her, ultimately descending into madness.”
The film sees a panicked Storrie running through brutalist architecture, trying to pay up his debt while hunting for his sister. Along the way, he’s beaten up and left bloodied, a rather different role to his beloved ice hockey player, Ilya Rozanov. April X was shot in Bucharest, Romania, in early 2024.
Storrie was cast as Bax early in the audition process, with director Parandi stating: “I remember telling everybody early on that he was going to be a movie star.
“He was very comfortable, very natural during the audition. They wanted me to see more people, so I basically told Connor, ‘You got the part, but give me some more time.’”
Parandi continued: “There is also a bit of method acting with him, which I really like. He goes through his own mind, and he’s very fast.”
‘A tender and sympathetic performance’
April X has a 27% critic rating and 67% public rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
“Production-wise, it was spotless. He was very easy, smooth, ready on time, always with the performance ready.”
Though the film received mixed reviews, Storrie was praised by The New York Times, which wrote that he is “the film’s saviour”.
The review continues that Storrie gives “a tender and sympathetic performance, elevating material that otherwise sags under the weight of so much same-old action movie cyber-stuff.”
Meanwhile, the Guardian noted that Storrie “does his best to bring conviction to the material, but this is not a work that will feature prominently in his CV in the years to come.”
April X is released digitally, on Prime Video, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten, on 3 November in the US and 6 November in the UK.
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