Original Coverage & Source Attribution: collider.com
Anastasia Allen transferred to Maple Hills to get closer to the Olympics, and Nate Hawkins is trying to make it to the NHL. Both have good reasons to be territorial about practice time, which is exactly what makes their first problem so satisfying. An accident leaves the figure skaters and hockey players with one rink between them, and two people used to getting their way have to agree on who gets the ice.
Netflix has already cast Daisy Jelley (Geek Girl) as Anastasia and Connor Simos (Subversion) as Nate. The latest addition is the person who has to keep the hockey team focused while its captain gets increasingly distracted. For that, Netflix turned to an actor who’s spent the last few years figuring out how to play a young James T. Kirk before he becomes the man everyone expects to take charge.
Netflix has cast Paul Wesley as Coach Neil Faulkner in Icebreaker, its adaptation of Hannah Grace’s bestselling hockey romance. The Vampire Diaries star joins the series as production gets underway in Vancouver, British Columbia. The cast also includes Auliʻi Cravalho as Lola, Gabriel Tierney as Aaron, and Aidan Shaw, who appeared in Heated Rivalry, as Russ. Netflix has yet to announce a premiere date.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes
Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite?
Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic
Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.
Harry & Sally(1989)
Love & Basketball(2000)
Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)
Titanic(1997)
FIND YOUR ROMANCE →
01
How does your love story start?
The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
AWe are friends for years before either of us says anything.
BWe want the same thing and neither of us backs down.
CNobody can know, including our closest friends.
DOne look across a room and everything changes.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
What do the two of you keep arguing about?
Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.
AWhether this is actually happening, and what to call it.
BWhose career comes first this year.
CWhether we will ever be honest about this in public.
DNothing small. When we fight, it is about everything.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
How do you show somebody that you love them?
Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.
AI remember every single thing they have told me.
BI show up to the things that matter to them.
CI keep their secrets like they are my own.
DI would give up something enormous for them.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
What is actually standing in the way?
There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.
ATiming. We keep finding each other at the wrong moment.
BAmbition. We both want big lives and they do not match.
CThe world. It is not safe to be open about this yet.
DEverybody around us has decided this cannot happen.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
Which romantic moment gets you every single time?
Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.
ASomebody running across a city to say it before midnight.
BSomebody in the stands who stayed until the very end.
CA look across a crowded room that nobody else catches.
DSomebody promising to hold on, and meaning it.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
What would you actually risk for the right person?
Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.
AA friendship I could never get back.
BThe plan I have had for my life since I was a kid.
CMy privacy. All of it would become public.
DEverything. I would not think about it for long.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Where are the two of you in ten years?
Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.
AStill talking. We have never run out of things to say.
BBuilding something together, both of us still ambitious.
CFinally open about it, after years of being careful.
DApart, and I still think about it constantly.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
Which of these sounds most like something you would say?
Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.
AI would rather talk to you than anybody else, forever.
BI am not giving up either of us. We find a way to have both.
CThis is mine, and I am not explaining it to anyone.
DI would do the whole thing again, even knowing how it ends.
REVEAL MY ROMANCE →
Roll The Credits
Your Romance Is…
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to
be somebody’s person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of
you.
When Harry Met Sally · 1989
Harry & Sally
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have
already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most
durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy,
conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening. - You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is
doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers. - The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly
until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it. - You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
Love & Basketball · 2000
Love & Basketball
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own
life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the
relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of
them equally seriously. - You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a
rival, and that never entirely goes away. - It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each
other, but whose turn it is this year. - You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
Heated Rivalry · Rachel Reid · HBO Max 2025
Heated Rivalry
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are
drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting
somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides,
meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned. - You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things
more real than public ones. - The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what
it would cost either one to say it out loud. - Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally
stop hiding.
Titanic · 1997
Titanic
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is
immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version
of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five
days, which is precisely the point of it. - You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats
decades of something merely comfortable. - The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an
enormous life afterwards because of it. - You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the
same way.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
Who Is Paul Wesley Playing in Netflix’s ‘Icebreaker’?
In Grace’s novel, Faulkner is a former NHL player whose career ended after he was hit by a drunk driver, giving his strict approach to coaching some weight with the perfect actor in the role. Nate is still chasing the career Faulkner had, and every practice that turns into a fight over rink time is a practice his team could have spent getting better. Netflix has confirmed Wesley’s role, with the specifics of Faulkner’s story on screen still to come.
Icebreaker also comes with an audience that has had years to decide what it wants to see from Maple Hills. The novel spent 70 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold nearly 5 million copies worldwide, according to data supplied by Netflix. Readers will recognize a couple of names in the supporting cast that could matter well beyond Nate and Anastasia’s story. Russ and Henry, played by Shaw and Devin Craig, go on to lead their own Maple Hills books, Wildfire and Daydream, respectively. The series in production adapts the first book, with Gossip Girl alum Amanda Lasher as showrunner and Jade Halley Bartlett as creator.
Icebreaker does not currently have a release date. Stay tuned with Collider for updates on all of your favorite romances, both on the ice and off!
- Network
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Netflix
- Writers
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Jade Halley Bartlett, Amanda Lasher
Cast
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Daisy Jelley
Anastasia “Stassie” Allen
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Connor Simos
Nate Hawkins
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