There are few jobs in Hollywood more dangerous than agreeing to play a fictional man who millions of readers have a perfect idea of inside their heads.
Connor Simos is about to discover this. Netflix has found the two leads for its adaptation of Hannah Grace’s Icebreaker. Daisy Jelley will play competitive figure skater Anastasia “Stassie” Allen. And Simos will take on the role of college hockey captain Nate Hawkins. Now I can bet that, somewhere on BookTok, thousands of readers have already opened the casting photographs and started investigating.
The series follows Stassie, a figure skater who is determined to reach the Olympics. Then we have Nate, a hockey player with his sights set on the NHL. The interesting thing is that their teams have to share a rink after an accident. So you can bet the tension will be high. And yes, this will naturally add to the inconvenience and the type of attraction that nobody in a romance novel has ever successfully ignored.
Grace’s novel became a BookTok phenomenon after its release in 2022. Not only did it spend 70 consecutive weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, it has also sold nearly five million copies worldwide. But wait, there’s more, it is also the first book in the Maple Hills series, which means Netflix is not simply casting one romance. The streamer could be laying the foundation for an entire television universe filled with athletes who spend a suspicious amount of time discussing their feelings. Netflix
You could say that casting a popular book adaptation looks exhausting. Because readers do not simply know these characters. They have assigned them faces, voices, heights and probably very specific ways of posing in different settings. The actor may match every written description, yet there will always be that person that will find the smallest discrepancy.
Jelley enters the series with appearances in Geek Girl, How to Have Sex and How to Date Billy Walsh. Simos has a much shorter screen résumé, which may actually work in his favour. Viewers will not arrive with years of other characters attached to him. Netflix gets a relatively fresh face, while Simos gets to become famous and face intense online analysis at roughly the same time.
Sounds relaxing.
But casting photographs can only tell us so much. Nate and Stassie work because of the energy between them. So this is what needs to happen. Readers need to believe that these two ambitious athletes can irritate one another. That they can also support one another. And in doing so, create enough romantic tension to keep an entire audience staring at an ice rink for a very long time. Sounds amazing, right?
Netflix has already released a short video of Jelley and Simos together, but the real test will come when the cameras begin rolling. TheWrap confirmed that Jade Halley Bartlett created the adaptation, while Amanda Lasher will serve as showrunner and writer. Grace is also involved as an executive producer, alongside Alex Cooper and the team at Unwell Productions. TheWrap
The adaptation also shows just how much influence BookTok now has over what reaches our screens. Publishing once relied heavily on reviews, bookshops and recommendations from that one friend who always seems offended when you have not finished the novel yet. And thanks to TikTok that has changed. A few enthusiastic videos can revive an older book, push it onto bestseller lists and eventually place it in front of streaming executives looking for an audience that already exists.
And Icebreaker certainly comes with an audience.
That is useful for Netflix because millions of people already know the title. But it also means that there will be high expectations for the series, attached to almost every scene. Readers will most certainly notice which moments have disappeared, which characters have changed and whether the adaptation has softened the more mature parts of the novel.
Because despite the skates and university setting, Icebreaker is not exactly a sweet little story about two athletes holding hands near a frozen lake.
Netflix will have to decide how closely the series follows the book’s steamier content while still making it accessible to the large younger audience that discovered it online. And alongside that, Netflix must turn a romance driven by internal thoughts and chemistry into something that works visually across several episodes.
No pressure there either.
The good news is that adaptations do not need to reproduce every sentence to work. They need to understand the reason readers loved it so much. For Icebreaker, that means preserving the humour, emotional safety and relationship between two people who take each other’s ambitions seriously.
Of course, viewers will still have their say and the debates will rattle on.
Netflix has not announced a release date, although production is expected to begin in Vancouver in October. So Jelley and Simos still have time before BookTok delivers its final verdict.
For now, Netflix has found its Stassie and Nate.
Whether they match the versions living inside five million different imaginations is an entirely different sport.
