AfriPulse
“Please,” Hudson Williams pants directly into my ear, close and intimate, hushed. And then? Then he whimpers.
Williams, the 24-year-old actor who has skyrocketed to fame alongside his 25-year-old Heated Rivalry co-star Connor Storrie in the weeks (weeks!) since the viral show’s premiere, isn’t physically in the room with me. No, he and Storrie, as feuding fae princes Finn and Dane, are moaning and teasing and flirting with one another from the intimate confines of my phone, as the vocal talent in the audio erotica app Quinn’s original series Ember & Ice .
The duo is the latest of the internet’s anointed boyfriends to bring their talents to the app, joining the likes of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Christopher Briney, Stranger Things’ Jamie Campbell Bower, and Fleabag’s Hot Priest himself, Andrew Scott.
Quinn launched in 2021 and has raised some $13.5 million in venture capital. It was founded by Caroline Spiegel, sister to Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, when she was struggling with sexual dysfunction as part of eating disorder recovery and found that she connected well with audio erotica in her quest to rediscover her libido.
“I made like a Tumblr blog with my favorite audio clips and shared it with my friends, and they really liked it, and it kind of started to build it into this idea for an app,” Spiegel tells Vanity Fair. Years later, she’s still on the smutty audio train, but graduated from curating on social media to heading the app, where subscribers can have nonstop dirty little nothings whispered into their ears on demand.
Spiegel and her team were early Heated Rivalry adopters, she says. She had seen the show’s trailer before HBO Max had made their distribution deal with Canada’s Crave, and reached out to Williams’ and Storrie’s teams to explore a collaboration.
“Our whole team is really also kind of fans of smut and reading and BookTok and so forth,” Spiegel says. “We just were so, like, enthralled with the trailer, and thought they were so amazing.”
As the ongoing (consensual) chokehold the show has on pop culture continues, it seems safe to say that the Quinn crew was onto something. Thanks to audio production’s lower costs and comparative simplicity, once Williams and Storrie signed on, things moved quickly. Heated Rivalry’s first two episodes premiered on November 25, 2025, and by December 16, the actors were donning little wings to shoot video promo clips for their series, Ember & Ice.
The first two installments of the story dropped on December 30, just a hair over a month after Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander skated into viewers’ lives. As of January 19, users have listened to Ember & Ice for over 27 million minutes, according to Quinn’s data.
Audio “really works nicely when audiences are hungry for more content from a given rising star but they’re gonna have to wait months for, say, season two, or for the Summer I Turned Pretty movie, or whatever it is, right? So we kind of can fill that space for talent and feed their audiences with this smutty audiobook project,” Spiegel says.
She describes the plot of Ember & Ice as “‘Brokeback-otar’—the idea was Brokeback Mountain mixed with ACOTAR,” referencing A Court of Thorns and Roses, the hit romantasy book series from Sarah J. Maas.
Selecting plotlines and talent is “part art and part science,” Spiegel says, with the team considering user feedback and requests and their own gut instincts as romance fans.
“So much of our casting process is in conversation with the culture and in conversation with the internet and what people are interested in and talking about,” Spiegel says. “So we’re just lucky that we can turn around the project to meet that.”
Asked about her dream collaborators for future Quinn Originals, Spiegel throws out a few of the usual objects of the zeitgeist’s lusty daydreams: Idris Elba, Pedro Pascal, Jonathan Bailey, and the entire cast of Euphoria, but especially Hunter Schafer.
The app already has more original series in the pipeline, featuring voices that Spiegel hopes are future fan obsessions, a la Williams and Storrie, where she can get in on the ground floor.
“Now, let’s see if I can do it again, right?”
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Source: VanityFair | Read the Full Story…
