Ten months ago, Hudson Williams was standing on the red carpet at the Toronto premiere of Heated Rivalry, with little idea of what was about to happen to his life.
Now, he’s back in the city filming season two, fielding questions from an extraordinarily passionate fanbase and squeezing a TIFF appearance into one of his days off.
“Holy s**t, what the hell happened?” Williams said, looking back at a photo from the November 2025 Toronto premiere during TIFF’s Making Waves with Hudson Williams conversation on Thursday.
He compared the months that followed to a “little rocket ship” that he and co-star Connor Storrie simply clung on to.
“Where are we going? I don’t know,” he joked.
It’s a pretty accurate description of Williams’ past 10 months. Heated Rivalry transformed the B.C. actor into an international star almost instantaneously, and his career hasn’t slowed down since.
During his TIFF conversation, detailing the entirety of his film history, Williams went all the way back to his pre-Heated Rivalry days, talked about his love of Canadian filmmaking and strange little movies, and teased what’s coming next.
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Williams and Storrie may have spent months talking about Shane and Ilya after the show’s explosive success, but apparently that didn’t make stepping back into their skates any easier.
In fact, Williams said the two actors went into season two feeling “possibly overconfident.”
“We know the characters like the back of our hand,” Williams recalled what the pair was thinking. “We’re gonna show up, and it’s just gonna be Ilya and Shane.”
Then Storrie went back to work.
After his first day, Williams said Storrie admitted to him that something felt strange: “Am I good? Am I in it? Am I doing the thing? Am I doing, like, an impression of Ilya?”
Williams initially thought he’d fare better.
“I was like, okay, chump,” he joked. “Shane’s gonna come back like that.”
Then he got to set.
“I was doing the scene, and there were some extras who were clearly fans,” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh God, oh God. Am I doing a Shane impression?’”
The problem, Williams realized, was that the characters didn’t entirely belong to them anymore.
Their memories of making season one had become intertwined with seeing the edited episodes, hearing what fans thought and watching viewers dissect every glance between their characters.
“Our memory isn’t ours,” Williams said. “It’s everyone’s. It’s been abstracted and twisted and just become this weird amalgamation of a memory.”
Eventually, things clicked again, helped by the return of the same crew and creator Jacob Tierney’s efforts to keep the set feeling as intimate as it did the first time around. Storrie and Williams have both been spotted walking the streets of Toronto and generally refusing photos with fans; could this be attributed to their journey back to their characters?
Williams understandably couldn’t spill much about what fans can expect from the upcoming season, but he did offer one particularly intriguing clue.
Season two, he said, is about “external adversity.”
Fans of Rachel Reid’s books (who was in the audience at Williams’ talk) probably already have a pretty good idea of what that could mean.
Williams described the next chapter as dealing with relationship and communication problems that “feel very real and human.”
For an actor who has spent so much time portraying everything Shane doesn’t say, fans can assume that this challenge will come to a head in his performance this season.
There will be moments, Williams said, when he leaves set frustrated by everything that remains unsaid between the characters.
But that’s also part of the fun.
“Hopefully it’ll make for really good TV.”
Shane isn’t exactly known for pouring his heart out. Much of Williams’ performance happens through tiny expressions, gestures and moments of restraint, and fans noticed.
He pointed specifically to a bathroom scene in which Shane struggles to stand up for himself because, as Williams puts it, he’s simply “too f**king smitten.”
“He’s just too in love with this man,” Williams said, explaining that Shane needs Ilya’s touch “too f**king much” to confront his behaviour in that moment.
Those tiny motivations weren’t necessarily things Williams expected viewers to identify. “Everyone picked up on all those little things, the world that I was trying to build,” he said.
Aside from Williams’ performance, there’s another reason he is particularly proud of the series and it’s one we all share with him: it’s proudly Canadian.
Anyone who’s watched enough movies and TV filmed in this country knows the routine. Toronto becomes New York, Vancouver becomes Seattle, and Canadian actors perfect American accents.
What sets Heated Rivalry apart is Tierney’s rejection of this routine.
Williams praised Tierney for wearing Canada “so proud” and refusing to disguise the show’s identity.
“It felt good to be playing the Canadian on the Canadian show,” he said. “It was something I’d never thought I would get to do.”
Williams’ next few projects are luckily keeping him firmly in Canada, meaning more and more fans will have the opportunity to get turned down for photos in the streets.
In YAGA, from Canadian playwright and showrunner Kat Sandler, Williams plays not one but two characters.
He describes Henry as a “well-traveled, pretentious piece of shit” who is manipulative, conceited and charming.
Logan, meanwhile, is a “little perverted boy” who might have some heart buried underneath it all.
The opportunity to play two wildly different people was part of the attraction, particularly after Heated Rivalry.
“There was definitely a desire I have that it’s not just, you played Shane, so here’s something just like him,” Williams said.
He’ll take another sharp turn in the upcoming Toronto-shot Apparatus, where he stars alongside Dylan O’Brien.
Williams describes his character Jason as a “little Uber driver incel” and, bizarrely enough, he became one of the hardest characters Williams has ever had to leave behind.
Between the “black strapped shoes,” “little sh**ty jacket,” “gross little pants” and greasy hair, Williams said everything about Jason was “so bad.”
“But I was so sad to hang that guy up, because he was so familiar.”
As for the movie itself?
“It’s a wild ride.”
If there is a connecting thread between Williams’ upcoming projects, his early short films and the movies he loves, it’s the ability to get freaky.
Williams repeatedly returned to his admiration for filmmakers who move beyond straightforward realism, citing David Lynch and Nicolas Cage while discussing the kind of work that excites him.
He likes projects that are heightened, off-center and “trying to almost find something more honest by making them more peculiar.”
Horror is high on his wish list, too. He says he developed a high horror threshold as a kid and became fascinated by the genre’s ability to push performances and emotions to extremes.
“There’s so much allegory and just rage, pain, disgusting drugs, just these really big scenarios that are just really fun to play.”
He’s also still interested in eventually making something entirely his own.
Before Heated Rivalry, Williams spent years making short films with friends, sometimes producing one practically every month. He wants to turn that experience into a feature one day, ideally something so singular that it feels like nobody else could have made it.
“I would start there, trying to find [an] idea that feels like only I can make it,” he said, before joking that he’d then become a “power-hungry, conceited maniac” and write, direct and act in it himself.
For someone whose career changed almost overnight, Williams seems remarkably interested in the same thing he was doing before anyone knew who Shane Hollander was: making strange stuff with people he likes.
And while he’s still processing just how far that little rocket ship has travelled since Heated Rivalry premiered in Toronto last November, he’s certainly enjoying the ride.
“It simultaneously feels like it was three days ago and also like five years ago,” Williams said. Ten months, apparently, can do a lot.
