Hudson Williams

Before we hit record, Hudson Williams is everything I thought he would be and more. He is this charismatic chaos engulfed in golden retriever energy—super playful, unexpected, yet endearing. But there's also this deeply introspective side to him. There's a quiet awareness, a thoughtfulness that emerges when our conversation goes deeper. It's this duality that defines him: Williams is the kind of person who lights up talking about his craft, but also becomes reflective thinking about everything that has happened to him. And a lot has happened.

Less than a month ago, Williams skyrocketed to fame as Shane Hollander in Crave’s and HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry, a sports romance show based on the Game Changers book series by Rachel Reid. He went from serving tables at Old Spaghetti Factory to becoming the internet's boyfriend overnight. "This is different," he tells me. Now he's navigating countless new opportunities, parasocial relationships, and figuring out how to take care of himself amid the newfound fame. "I think having good boundaries that you set is really important," he says. "What I'll talk about with the press, what I won't, how much press I even do." Through it all, he's leaning on his community. "I'm connecting with my friends because they're my stability and my source of joy and peace."

In our conversation, Williams opened up about playing Shane, leaning into that desperation for love, and crying on his last day of shooting because someone finally believed in him.

Timid Magazine: In Heated Rivalry, Shane is so careful about how he's perceived. You seem like the opposite—pretty comfortable in your own chaos. When you're playing him, do you ever feel the friction between who he is and who you are?

Hudson Williams: Yeah, absolutely. He's like a giant wooden suit with not too many articulating joints. I love him dearly, but he is exhausting because although it's my accent to a degree, it's not my voice. I'm very expressive, I'm loud, and he is tight-lipped and tight-throated, and he walks like a little frickin' square. He's like a Roomba, and has the emotional expression of one as well.

So it’s exhausting, but the friction is also sort of liberating in a sense that I can just be very sardonic and not necessarily earnest all the time. I'm trying to work at that. Even if Shane just says "you're an asshole" or "fuck you," his heart is on his sleeve no matter what. It's just pure earnestness and a real lack of ability to articulate himself into a lie or a less truthful place. His heart is always in his eyes, and that is kind of refreshing to be in, but it's also scary.

Sometimes I think people might not like him, but it's like, "Oh, I hope people understand him." This is someone who's very close to me. These are family members. These are friends. These are neurodivergent people I know very well. So I'm also scared for him because a lot of the time I'm like, do I make him more cinematic and more sellable and more of a charismatic performance? Shane is not charismatic. There's a wardrobe person on set who said, "Hudson, you're hot as hell, but Shane's unfuckable." And I was like, "Well, yeah, I guess that's Shane."

TM: There's really something endearing about Shane. You touched on his neurodivergence a bit. In another interview, you said you understood Shane immediately because your dad is on the spectrum and you pulled from that. When you're playing him, did it shift how you saw your father at all?

HW: I'm not sure if it changed as much as it just felt like I got to live with him in a different way. Shane feels very much like my father in a lot of ways. Thinking of him while playing Shane, that was a part of the build, the very first ingredients.

I think I said my dad has a boyish quality, but he's also mechanical. Shane is boyish, but he's also mechanical. Getting to live with that, be frustrated by that, be frustrated by the restrictions of it, it just made me feel even more empathy and love for my dad.

TM: I really love that. Another thing I love is episode five. Early on, sex is how Shane and Ilya communicate, but it kind of shifts there that where they have to be emotionally naked. What feels more exposing to play—is it the physical intimacy part, or those quiet moments where Shane shows up fully without his defenses?

HW: Ugh, it's definitely the latter. To cry in someone's arms is possibly the most intimate thing I think a human can do, let alone bare your heart on your sleeve and have to look someone in the eye. It's terrifying for me, and I'm an actor and my job is to be some soapy bitch. But for Shane, it is like death.

It's also not to say I'm some Stanislavski nut or whatever, but I feel like all actors connect with the emotions they're meant to be feeling to some degree, just inadvertently.  On set through Shane, my thoughts start to get filtered. So when I have to be emotional, it's not quite like my thoughts are similar to when I'm just existing as me. It's like, "Oh, holy fuck. This is so much sadness. This is so much bursting of tears. How can I show this? How am I allowed to present this?" Because if it was me, I would just be bawling in front of a person, like, "I need a hug." It would be much easier. So it's just terrifying on set.

TM: Did you or Connor [Storrie] prepare for that scene?

HW: That was day one of shooting. I'm pretty sure that was the second scene we shot before the Vegas scene where I crawled to him. But it was also one of our audition scenes. So preparing that was tricky because I'm like, "We're gonna be building a whole-ass, like, four-episode thing before this, and this is our first time working together in a connected scene. So how will this fit?"

We both talked with Jacob [Tierney] a lot. We're like, "How the hell do we sell this point?" We just tried to connect as much as we could, and I tried to find what I would be doing with Shane when he's a little bit more physically in his own shell, which isn't too much, but it's a little bit more direct and able to articulate. But it was sort of a prediction of just like, "I hope this will slot in in the future," because right now you don't know how much you're going to build or where those scenes are going to go for the next month. You have to predict where you'll be after a month of constant 12-hour days. So yeah, I was terrified.

TM: Both of you sold that scene so well. Another scene that you sold that is probably my favorite scene so far in the series is when you're both on the phone with each other and Shane tells Ilya to speak in Russian, to just let it all out even though he won't understand. What do you think it means to Shane to offer that kind of presence, to be with someone in their grief without needing to translate it or fix it?

HW: Yeah, that scene. Holy fuck. In that scene, Connor, boy, does he ever steal the fucking show. Tears the house down. But it also says a lot about their relationship. I was thinking about it today, why these two people are so comfortable with each other. There's something of Ilya—he's Slavic, Eastern European. His face is monotone. His voice is more expressive than Shane's. But Connor talks like, "I have this face, this face, this face, and that's it." Then the rest is his voice does the choke-up, his voice does the breaks and the rise. Connor's voice does the animation, whereas my face does the animation and my voice stays monotone. But somehow we fit into each other.

Ilya feels controlled, steady, and calm to me. I think to him, there is some sort of kinship between my flat affect and him being Eastern European and them having sort of a notable flat affect. So that phone call scene, there's just something about them where they don't have to move, they don't have to express too well to know everything in a weird way.

TM: It's being there, being present, which I think the world is craving for. In a dating culture that's all about keeping things casual, what do you think people are responding to in Ilya's and Shane's desperation and yearning for each other?

HW: Yeah, it's prophetic, and it's just loyal. It really is like some giant Jeff Buckley song. We don't really have that anymore, or at least we're going away from that. The rarities are the people who still kind of align with loyalty and looking at someone and going like, "Oh, I love you. I need to make this work in life, no matter how hard it gets." It's hurdles, army crawls, and razor wire. It's like there's a little bead in you that's good, and you have a lot of fucking baggage, but we can get through this.

The sentiment that baggage can be worked through is something, at least in my generation, we've thrown out the window. It's like the first flag—gone. Holy fuck, Shane and Ilya have a bunch of them. If they talked about it with their friends, they would say, "Run from this person. They suck." I think it's really meaningful for this show, not even just being a queer story to be like "I hate you, and yet I feel like I've always wanted to marry you."

TM: Yeah, and I think that's what's drawing so many people to it. It’s nice to see love so open, to be loved out loud regardless of our flaws.

HW: Yeah, loved out loud.

TM: At the end of episode five, Shane watches Scott and Kip kiss and they're finally out in the sun together. What do you think he's feeling at that moment?

HW: I think it short-circuits his brain a little, but underneath the shock of the moment, it makes him feel less alone. Shane is not the most observant fella. He doesn't even have a gaydar. So I think Scott was someone he admired and represents the guy who's done it and been in the league—macho, competent. And to see that guy kissing smoothie boy on screen in front of millions of watchers is like a little pressure off his shoulders of going, "Okay, this makes this a little less scary. I'm not sure I'm going to do that, but I'm glad someone did."

TM: In the season finale, after Shane and Ilya say "I love you," their intimacy shifts from urgent and primal to slower and more tender. What does that change say about where they are now?

It shows the seasonal nature of relationships and theirs takes on a unique shape but elements grow and elements die and I'm excited to see them in a different stage of their lives and relationship.

TM: So everyone talks about your great chemistry with Connor, but I'm more curious about the craft side. What's something that Connor does as an actor that makes you better as an actor?

HW: He's so incredibly present and so incredibly truthful. As an actor, it's so much easier to think of what you should be doing or what you think would be an entertaining version of this or the most dramatic version or make sure you're hitting these lines properly or doing the scene properly or the director wants this and the script says this. But just to actually listen to the person and let what they're saying affect you—Connor is so good at that. There's so many moments where I am saying something and the script says he does this, and he does something so unexpectedly emotional or so unexpectedly vulnerable that even if I'm very robotic and going through a scene, he can crack me and change my trajectory in the scene. He's a huge resource in affecting me and that makes my job way easier because I don't have to. He makes me be present. He's so good at that. That's his superpower.

TM: I love that. Do you have nicknames for each other?

HW: Yeah, he calls me Huddy, Papi, Bubba, Baby. I call him Pookie. I used to call him Pookie a lot. Papi. Oh, Con Con. I call him that both in text form and verbally. But yeah, a lot of nicknames.

TM: So season two is confirmed and season one is wrapped. What are you most excited to do next?

HW: After this brilliant collaboration with a very genius filmmaker and writer, Jacob Tierney, and that whole team, Brendan Brady, and all the other higher-ups, built with love and clear vision, I just want to work on other stories. Jacob took a chance on me. I cried when we wrapped our last day and just said—I think what broke me was "Thank you for believing in me." Because some people who know me might be like, "This character is not you, Hudson. This is a departure."

So I just hope more people keep giving me a chance like Jacob did. And yeah, I hope to work on projects where people believe in me for something that maybe I didn't believe people would believe in me for.

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The first season of Heated Rivalry can be streamed on HBO Max and Crave.