Connor Storrie has another magazine cover feature out this week! Hot on the heels of appearing in VMAN, this time Connor is gracing the cover of Vogue Adria, the Vogue imprint made for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The magazine prints in Serbian and English, and sure enough the interviewer notes early in the article that Connor greeted him with “Hi, how are you?” in perfect Serbian. I mean, just so smooth, so thoughtful! Sure, it’s possible he and Heated Rivalry costar Hudson Williams were given a crash course in media training once the show blew up… but I’m convinced this is just who Connor is. When someone is taking time to meet with him, he likes to make the gesture of greeting them in their own language. Once again the photos are glorious, if slightly less edgy yet more Western than the VMAN spread. But the best part is that the interviewer mainly gave Connor the space to share long, nuanced comments. Some highlights:

He gets tons of grateful messages from queer fans: Rachel Reid wrote this story in a very specific genre, consciously and intentionally. She’s said herself she wanted to address homophobia in hockey and spark conversation. And Jacob was very vocal about wanting to create a gay love story that wasn’t tragic. Not about people being torn apart, about lives destroyed without a happy ending. It’s important to return to Rachel’s intention and how Jacob translated it to screen. They’re brilliant. And it makes me so happy that it resonated. I receive so many messages, especially from queer people, who feel seen through Ilya. Who feel validated as bisexual. Who genuinely connect to that narrative. This could have remained just a sweet love story with a twist. But it’s incredibly moving how deeply it echoed, how many people globally saw themselves in it.

It’s all about the human experience: I think the role of art is to present an experience, and the conversation we have around it is what creates change. It’s a delicate line. Art that tries to be didactic can backfire. Heated Rivalry wasn’t created as a pretentious lecturing. It simply shared an experience so people could understand a different position. That honesty is what drew people in. You can connect to a story on a human level. That’s why it matters. Not because it’s over-intellectualized or academic. It’s about specific human experiences you can witness and understand, even if you don’t identify with them, and that makes you think. I’ve heard conversations about hockey, sport, sexuality from people who played sports and realized, statistically, at least one person they knew probably went through something similar. That’s the most you can hope for—that you’re part of something strong enough to make people reflect on their own experience.

Just go for it! I’ve had enough minor disappointments that I’ve become disillusioned with expectations and chasing specific outcomes. You can’t put that much weight on anything. Let’s say I do a movie and it’s not good and people don’t like it. That hurts, of course. But if I have faith in my vision, in my creativity, and there are people out there who see me as an artist, then it’s like—okay, we did that, let’s move on. Some of the most brilliant actors have been part of things that weren’t great. Projects can take a sour turn. We never know. And that’s okay. It can be scary. But that’s not proof of quality. Even with Heated Rivalry, I was fully aware it could have been cringe. It could have gone wrong. That doesn’t mean someone did bad work. Reception is partly out of your hands. Some great films fail commercially and become classics 25 years later. I try to remind myself of that constantly. All you can do is your best, go for it. Time keeps moving. So just go big and don’t get too lost in it.

[From Vogue Adria]

This man is all of 26, and waxing poetic like a philosopher. AND he knows how to rock a diamond necklace! I mean, my word! I’m trying to work out how much of this self-assurance is his age, his gender, or just very intrinsically who he is. Probably a combination of all three. And if you can believe it, these excerpts were just a few of the rich soliloquies in the article. He talks about his family moving so often that he changed schools 13 times, about finishing his directorial debut, a film he shot on his iPhone called Transaction Planet, and about the immediate love and chemistry he had with Hudson. Plus Vogue Adria ran an accompanying feature where Connor describes “the five films that defined him.” He’s a big fan of absurdism, with two Yorgos Lanthimos films on the list, and the fifth film slot going to the entire oeuvre of David Lynch. I’m sure we’ll see Connor in another bonkers Yorgos-Emma Stone collaboration sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Photos credit: Cover Images, Avalon.red and via Instagram/Vogue Adria