‘The not-so-secret gay past of rugby.’ In Heated Rivalry, Connor Storrie is embracing a very public history most rising stars would prefer to forget. Now, old videos from a YouTube channel he started at 12 are ricocheting around the internet, and as they resurface, pushed by social media algorithms, the actor says he’s keeping them online — not because it is good for his career, but as an act of self-acceptance.
The choice is a confident read on today’s fame economy, in which discovery often triggers a digital archaeology of forgotten usernames and early experiments. Storrie’s message is clear: That kid was him, and deleting him isn’t the idea.
A Viral Past Meets a Carefully Considered Present
After Heated Rivalry bumped Storrie and his co-star Hudson Williams into the algorithm’s top echelon, fans rediscovered the actor’s childhood channel — effusive monologues, sketches, discipline-breaching perfervidness of a neophyte artist trying out performance in public. The brief statement may not be the last of it: In an interview with People, Storrie confessed he gave some thought to taking down the clips entirely and even sought removal assistance from a YouTube contact before changing his mind.
He described his reversal as part of a “self-acceptance” moment: owning the awkward and earnest along with the polished present. Rather than whitewash his digital past, he’s letting it breathe. That choice rings out in an industry that frequently values control over erasure.
The embrace feels deliberate. Announcing the nominees at a cardboard podium (his “real world” props are limited by his quarantine circumstances) for one of the industry’s biggest awards shows, Storrie gave a sly nod to his origins with an opening riff that any longtime internet sleuth would pick up on — a wink to those who heard this same cadence in his earliest uploads.
From West Texas Roots to a Breakout Moment
Storrie has also been honest about the gulf between when he began and now. Raised in Odessa, Texas, he didn’t fit the local script — sports were not the attraction; performing and building worlds were. In an interview with Variety, he also talked about that younger version of himself and how long it took him to be OK with himself.
Asked what he’d advise his 12-year-old YouTuber self now, Storrie did not say “blend in.” He’d go bigger. Make things. Forget waiting to be invited into the room: write your way into the door. That ethos lines up with a generation of sons and daughters of actors who built momentum by making their own proof-of-concept before landing that first marquee role.
The Digital Footprint Reality for Today’s Teen Creators
Storrie’s position falls on a landscape where early posts are résumé and risk alike. According to Pew Research Center, YouTube is all but universal among U.S. teenagers, with a huge share using the site daily; for many, this has meant years of on-camera adolescence archived in plain sight. In the meantime, employer surveys from organizations such as CareerBuilder have long reported on hiring managers screening social media histories, further justifying that instinct to scrub.
Public figures are especially susceptible to retroactive pile-ons when old content re-emerges bereft of context. Europe’s “right to be forgotten” laws codified removal pathways for private citizens, but celebrities inhabit a different realm. Opting for transparency over deletion, Storrie proposes a countermodel: contextualization of the past rather than its erasure.
Why Audiences Reward Openness About Online Origins
Research and industry analysis often indicate that audiences are drawn toward authenticity, and entertainment is no exception. Stars including Troye Sivan and Quinta Brunson have made open references to their internet-era origins; that honesty seems to fortify fan connection rather than undermine it. Storrie’s answer is part of that pattern — it makes a potential liability into an origin story fans can watch, in real time.
It also redefines vulnerability as art — craft. Early works-in-progress make the process, not perfection, visible. For fans, that’s sticky content; for an actor, it’s a living archive of repetition, failure, and incremental growth — things any career in the performing arts is made out of.
A Small Choice That Signals Something Much Bigger
In a culture that often prizes the clean slate, Storrie’s decision to maintain the muddy, earnest beginnings might be the more radical decision. It recognizes the whole journey — the Odessa kid with a camera, and the actor at the center of a buzzy series — and asks fans to connect the dots for themselves.
If the internet has a long memory, then perhaps the solution isn’t to delete but to narrate. Here, Storrie is writing that story himself, one viral throwback at a time.
