It may seem like everything’s happened overnight for Heated Rivalry breakout Hudson Williams, but the 24-year-old actor swears it’s felt a bit more gradual on his end.
“There’s no way to prepare for what this side of things looks like,” Williams tells The Hollywood Reporter about his newfound stardom. The actor was in L.A. for the show’s first round of in-person U.S. press, and he’s in good spirits despite what has to be a long week.
It’s hard to go on the Internet and not see Williams or his co-star, Connor Storrie. The HBO Max–Crave series, based on Rachel Reid’s novel of the same name, has been a surprise hit for the streaming services.
Written and directed for television by Letterkenny alum Jacob Tierney, Heated Rivalry follows Williams’ Shane Hollander, an anxious and endlessly endearing Canadian hockey prodigy and his rival, Russian phenom Ilya Rozanov, played by Storrie. The show takes audiences along for the ride as the pair navigate a near-decade-long situationship, spanning their entire professional hockey careers.
Even if things didn’t happen overnight, life is looking a bit different than it used to for Williams. Before taking on Heated Rivalry, he was working as a waiter at The Old Spaghetti Factory in New Westminster, British Columbia. He assures he never once felt better than the job but did feel he was “good enough” at acting that he should be seeing some reward from that front.
“But I loved it. That was how I paid my rent. It was paycheck to paycheck. Vancouver is more expensive than Los Angeles, so it was very hard,” he says of his old gig. “I had a great outlook. In a lot of ways, it was a lot easier than what it’s like now.”
As Heated Rivalry heads into its penultimate episode, its popularity continues to grow. It was announced last week that it had been renewed for a season two. Williams, however, is proceeding with cautious optimism, looking forward to whatever the future might hold.
Below, the actor speaks with THR about what he initially thought life would look like after Heated Rivalry, how he deals with negative comments online and what he hopes comes next.
How are you doing? That’s a genuine question. I assume you’ve been a little crazy.
It is crazy. I feel like I’m a compass on a magnetic field. It’s pointing every which way, and I don’t know who the hell is right, but I’m very excited. It’s very auspicious looking. I was talking with Connor [Storrie] about this. I don’t know if someone’s going to reach out and be like, “We want you in this new YA show. It’s really poorly written, but we think you’re perfect.” Or if Luca Guadagnino is going to crawl out of Italy and be like, “I want you.” I don’t want to make any assumptions, so I’m just trying to be as calm as I can. But so far, the fan reactions are very nice and mostly wholesome. [I’m] overwhelmed, overscrolling on the socials, so I delete them lots. Every time I post something, I go and delete it again.
Wow, you just delete whole app?
Connor and I both do that. I deactivate Twitter and fully delete it, and I delete Instagram periodically, always.
Is it because you know you’ll look? Are you someone who wants to know?
Instagram, I don’t really have a problem actually. I can just look at it for 10 minutes, and then that’s my day. But Twitter’s the one [that’s a problem] because it’s shit posting. People are just thought, or lack of thought, to speech [and] they’ll post it. It’s still mainly good. I always doubted celebrities when they said, “There are going to be 200 good things, and you’ll remember the bad one.” I was like surely that can’t be true, and it is true. I also take the bad ones with a grain of salt. Sometimes they’re so overtly mean [that] they just make me laugh so hard. Those are the ones I’m sharing with people around me. I think my friends and family sometimes even take joy in really overt assholes. (Laughs.)
Just because it’s so ridiculous?
It’s so ridiculous to actually believe these people. To actually go, “Oh my God.” To be offended would be to think they matter. It’s like, why be offended? Just kind of laugh.
You now suddenly have a lot of people talking about you on online. It seemed quick from the outside. Do you find it more difficult to deal with because it wasn’t as gradual? Or is it simply something you can’t prepare for?
I don’t think it’s something you can prepare for. I would say to a degree it has been gradual. We saw the fans find us when we were halfway through shooting — they found it through Instagram sleuthing — so it wasn’t like, oh, this is a totally normal fan base. It was like, oh, these people can be obsessive. Then I think our Instagrams only went to a few thousand followers. We had a Canadian press [run], which was a little bit more light. We had Montreal day one, which wasn’t too crazy. There was a big packed house full of fans, but it wasn’t like press, press, press. Then day two was Toronto, and it was more cast and crew. Then we had press later on, so it was kind of a build. But at the end of the day, still feels reminiscent of an overnight success. There’s no way to prepare for what this side of things looks like.
When you took this project on, what did your life look like?
I was serving at The Old Spaghetti Factory [in] New Westminster. It’s like y’all’s version of an Olive Garden. I would argue less swanky, but I loved it there. Walking through that door every day though, through the server’s entrance, is a little bit like… I’m not better than this, but I do feel I’m good enough at acting that I should be reaping some reward for it. But I loved it. That was how I paid my rent. It was paycheck to paycheck. Vancouver is more expensive than Los Angeles, so it was very hard. I had a great outlook. In a lot of ways, it was a lot easier than what it’s like now.
I’m very curious what you thought life was going to look like once the show came out when you initially signed on.
When I got this role, and I saw the fan base — it wasn’t a New York Times bestseller and it didn’t have any metrics of how many copies it sold. Jacob was coming off Shoresy and Letterkenny, so I was looking at that as a metric. For him to do two successful shows that are hockey related, I thought it seemed a little bit more commercially viable. If you go gay hockey, less hockey… I didn’t think it would blow up to this. I thought it’d be more of a niche fan base. Not that I think of Instagram followers or anything, but unfortunately it is sort of a metric of relevancy in actors. I thought I’d maybe get 100,000 [followers] by episode six release. Episode six drops, five months go past. There’s a climb. I’ll maybe cap out 100,000 followers, and that’ll be the level, so this already is like, oh, fuck, did not expect this. (Laughs.)
Why do you think it clicked? What is it that you saw in the show that you’re happy that other people are seeing in it?
I think the writing is brilliant. I know there is a lot of sex and a lot of stuff that’s sparking interest in it. There’s a very garish title. It’s not subtle in advertising. But I always thought from the moment I read [them], they are Emmy’s quality scripts, and Jacob is a brilliant writer. I’m honored to be a part of this. All Connor and I could do was fuck it up.
Well, you didn’t.
After seeing how good Connor was at Ilya and then him getting cast, it made me a little bit more confident that Jacob must be casting me somewhat right. If Connor was so good at what he does, maybe if I’m almost as good as that, then I must be pretty OK. I [also] think queer sports hasn’t really been done too much. If Challengers was the cocktease of it all, then our show just leans in and gets in there.
How much did you know about this story before? Were you aware of it?
I didn’t even know hockey smut was a thing, let alone popular. I wasn’t even very familiar with how these women-catered romance genres, how fucking vulgar they are. Not in a bad way, by any means, but they get into it. They get so nasty and so descriptive. It’s beautiful, I love it. But holy fuck, I just didn’t realize that was the level. Reading it, the heart permeates way past it. It supersedes the sex and the level of intimacy, and these characters really stay with you after you read them. That’s sort of what surprised me to a degree.
Shane is such an internal character. Having read this book, it wasn’t super clear how that would work on screen. Did that give you pause? Was that something you had to work through day-to-day?
After reading Jacob’s scripts, even before the book, I immediately saw how he would operate. My dad is on the spectrum, he knows it. He’s a mechanical engineer, graduated top of his class, first in class in everything, very technical genius in a lot of ways, but sort of socially… I think he would say that he doesn’t want to deal with emotions. He has told me, I’m not even paraphrasing, “I relate more with Vulcan than human,” referencing the Star Trek, the hyper-cerebral alien creatures. I love my dad to death, and I’ve always felt very connected to him. He has a sensitivity to him that is very boyish. I think when I read the script, I took a huge page out of living my life with him. Rachel [Reid] has said [Shane] is autistic, so I think I knew how it should look. I empathized with him a lot, immediately.
What is it about Shane that you love and were drawn to?
He is hyper competent at this one thing. He’s stereotypically masculine in a lot of regards. He’s a kind person, and he’s so overtly Canadian. He’s harboring something that he thinks is a career-ending secret because he just doesn’t have the emotional maturity or societal maturity to sort of understand what his own queerness means. To him, it’s most likely detrimental, which is the wrong assumption to some degree, but it shatters his own idea of what his masculinity is, or at least it cripples it. And yet, he still never harms a fly.
This story takes place over almost a decade. This was all filmed together, correct? How do you handle that as an actor?
I remember immediately after I heard Jacob was directing all of it, I called him before we even went to Toronto. I [asked him if he was] blockshooting this thing. He [said we were] shooting it one giant five-hour movie. I was like oh, fuck. OK, I know what that means. It means out of order, and it looks like a goddamn headache. I was talking with actors who had done Christopher Nolan-y storylines because I [wanted to know how] they did that.
What did you find out?
A lot of the actors I kept hearing [from] were talking about physical maps that they drew, like a cheat sheet of timeline points. I remember I did that pretty early on, drawing a map. Then the scripts were so clear of where they were each time that if I was coming into a day, we’re doing year two, and it’s the 10th hour of the shoot day, and before that we were shooting year eight. I would have to [ask Jacob] what happened right before. “Pre-Rose, post this, this happened, haven’t said this yet.” I got it, and then he would have to tell me very little for me to know exactly what happens after and what has happened right before. I had a pretty dense understanding of the timeline, and so I felt like I could jump in emotionally. It didn’t feel like I needed much last minute prep on it. I goof off a lot, but all the work was done was well before I even got to set.
You said something earlier that was essentially that you were doing a gay hockey show minus a lot of the hockey. But hockey was still a part of it. Did you know how to skate? Were you athletic growing up?
I played a lot of sports, but I did not know how to skate.
Like at all or…
I could stand without falling, and push and waver around the ice, but it wasn’t even a true skate, skate. It was like, I’m just not falling and a little bit past just taking steps. I [asked] Jacob how much hockey he needed us to do. That was one of the first questions I asked him. He was like, “Jump off the bench, skate up to the face off.” I made it my goal to be able to play rec hockey; drop in beer league hockey was my sort of obnoxious goal. I fell short, but from the gist of what I understood from him, it would’ve been more than what we needed.
What about when you shot the hockey scenes?
The hockey section was all packed into one week, and it was much later into the shoot. We didn’t step on the ice until our fourth week in or something. Even when we were in Toronto, we were meeting with our hockey coordinator to skate. The closer we got to the hockey, I [started thinking]; how do I hold a mouth guard? How do I jump over the thing? How do I touch my gloves? How do I hold the stick when I’m just chilling? How do I stretch? I realized it wouldn’t be all this hockey stuff, it’ll be hockey culture stuff. It’ll be details.
You seem to be having a lot of fun with this experience, which is nice to see. What are you doing to keep it fun, especially as it gets a bit more daunting perhaps?
Well, I have one of my best friends for life right beside me through it all, which is already a luxury that a lot of actors don’t get. I’m sure I would’ve probably had a smaller appetite for the amount of stuff we’re doing if I didn’t have him through this. I’m an omnivert, leaning more to an extrovert, but I still get… I have ADHD, I’m unmedicated, currently, for the last while, so my social battery can just tap [out] pretty quick. At the end of the day, I’m pretty forgiving with myself if I’m talking with a reporter in a polite, more boring way. Then when I’ve had coffee, and I’ve had a nap, I let myself be chaotic. I let myself off the leash. I try to say, whatever mood I’m in, just be Canadian, don’t be mean. Whatever they get, they get.
There was already a built-in fanbase for this project, but you did shoot most of it in a bubble before people knew. Do you think that helped?
In hindsight, I want to say it was probably really helpful. I did still go on social media and Reddit to hear people’s discussion about the book because I did want it to be a shared effort in a way. Also, I’ve read the scripts. Shane is fucking overthinking things every single second. If this just makes me more neurotic, it can only help. For another character, I would not do that necessarily. It would’ve probably been more overwhelming with more people hearing about it before we shot it, but I think it would’ve still looked similar. I had the assurance that whatever I did in the audition without having read the book was something that resonated with Jacob. I think he cried during one of the chemistry reads. I [thought] that was a good sign. After reading the book, and then reading discussions about the book and the character — I think it was good that it got to feel like a student film. At this level of hype, it could’ve only added more pressure on Connor and me, and just made it a little bit more uncomfortable.
In terms of what’s next, what’re you hoping for as you continue this journey? Do you know what that is at this point for you? How are you feeling about it?
Some people talk about this show like it’s just smut. I don’t know if I can trust my own opinion on if I just did The Vampire Diaries or if I did Normal People. I believe in the work I did. I believe [in] what Jacob wrote. At the end of the day, I believe I have a lot more to offer. As an actor, and an actor who likes character actors, those have always been the role models from a single digit age. That’s just where I’d want to go — challenging roles with auteur filmmakers is the very natural, not forced proclivity. If it actually pans out that way, I’m very appreciative. If it leads to very commercial piss and cheap fast food movies, well then, OK, I guess. Not what I envisioned, but I could still be at The Old Spaghetti Factory, so I can’t be too much of a prude.
HiCelebNews online magazine publishes interesting content every day in the TV section of the entertainment category. Follow us to read the latest news.
