Are Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie Just Queerbaiting? Resurfaced Clips Reveal Heated Rivalry Stars' Past

Hudson Williams is dancing in a restaurant uniform.

It's 2024, the Old Spaghetti Factory in New Westminster, British Columbia. The lighting is unforgiving, the décor aggressively beige, and yet there he is on someone's phone camera, grinning, loose-limbed, half-performing for co-workers, half just shaking off another service shift.

No stylists. No publicist lurking in the wings. No streaming juggernaut yet.

Scroll down and the comments tell their own story. 'He's got the sadness in his eyes that only people in the service industry have,' one person writes, with the grim solidarity of anyone who has ever carried plates for minimum wage. Another: 'Oh I just KNOW he was everyone's work crush.'

It is a tiny artefact, the sort of clip that should have been buried under ten years of forgotten posts. Instead, it has been dug up, recirculated and pored over like forensic evidence in the trial of the moment: are Heated Rivalry stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie genuinely like this, or are they just very good at queerbaiting?

The answer, if you pay even mild attention to the receipts, is not especially flattering to the conspiracy theories.

Before Heated Rivalry: The Hudson–Connor Archive

Heated Rivalry, the gloriously messy, 'filthy hockey romance' that became the most talked‑about show of 2025/26, didn't invent Hudson and Connor. It simply gave them a much bigger stage.

Before creator Jacob Tierney plucked them from semi-obscurity, both had the sort of CVs you'd expect from working young actors: tiny roles, indie projects, and the sort of internet series you only admit to having done when you're feeling brave or drunk.

Connor even landed a blink‑and‑you'll‑miss‑him part in Joker: Folie à Deux, a fact that now circulates online as if fans had uncovered a state secret.

The resurfaced clips blow a hole in the idea that their on‑screen chemistry and off‑screen antics were cooked up in a PR meeting. Back in 2015, a teenage Connor, roughly 15 at the time, was cast in a small‑scale production of Grease.

One of his co‑stars, Alexa, posted a video on Twitter that has since been gleefully rediscovered. The clip shows a kid buzzing with the exact same theatrical, slightly chaotic energy fans now recognise from press junkets and convention stages.

'This is how I find out Connor Storrie was in a production of Grease omg,' one person wrote, sounding both delighted and vaguely betrayed that nobody mentioned it sooner.

Hudson's pre‑fame trail is equally revealing. Aside from the Spaghetti Factory footage, a TikToker recently realised he'd been at the same music festival as her in 2024. She trawled through old videos and, sure enough, there he is in the background, dancing, gesturing, occupying space like someone who has never once worried about being too much.

'If you can't spot him, he's the one aura farming,' she joked, only half‑kidding.

Then there are the short films. Before Heated Rivalry, Hudson appears in a clutch of low‑budget projects, the kind of earnest shorts that pay in 'exposure' and maybe a lukewarm sandwich.

Fans have clipped and posted them across TikTok and X, expecting cringe, and instead finding something stranger: continuity. The same physical looseness. The same flamboyant line readings. The same refusal to flatten himself into a 'straight‑passing' leading man.

Most of these films were released in 2025, the very year he landed Heated Rivalry. In other words, this is not a man who suddenly discovered camp the minute a hockey romance fell into his lap.

Are Hudson Williams And Connor Storrie Queerbaiting – Or Just Themselves?

The accusation hanging over them is familiar: that two presumably straight actors are playing up a flirtatious, 'zesty' dynamic in interviews and fan interactions to court a queer audience without fully committing to being labelled as such.

It's a charge that exists for a reason; queer fans have watched studios dangle crumbs of representation long enough to recognise when they're being played.

But when you look at the pre‑fame footage, the queerbaiting narrative starts to look not just flimsy but, frankly, lazy.

Hudson, in grainy restaurant videos, in festival clips, in those underfunded shorts, is not performing a new persona. He is simply consistent: loud, physical, unfussed about how 'masculine' his gestures read. The internet shorthand is brutal but accurate: 'he's just built like that.'

Connor, meanwhile, does not appear to have had a single understated bone in his body since at least his Grease days. The wide‑eyed mugging, the theatricality, the eagerness to turn any backstage into a stage, it's all there long before Tierney's casting call.

What makes the queerbaiting label so off‑base, in this case, is the assumption that any man who is animated, affectionate with his male co‑star and unbothered by gender norms must be acting up for attention.

It says far more about the audience's discomfort than it does about the actors' intentions.

Of course, Hudson and Connor are not innocent bystanders in their own careers. They know exactly how beloved their dynamic is, and they have been savvy, sometimes shamelessly so, in leaning into that intimacy for promotion. They tease. They joke. They camp it up on panels. This is not a documentary.

But to flatten that into a deliberate, cynical queerbaiting strategy is to ignore the duller, more honest explanation: Heated Rivalry amplified what was already there. It didn't invent their mannerisms or their rapport; it monetised them.

What The 'Queerbaiting' Debate Misses

There is a broader discomfort humming underneath all this. We are still, apparently, unsettled by men who do not come with a clear sexuality label stamped on their forehead, yet behave in a way that reads as unabashedly queer‑coded. The demand is always the same: define yourself or be accused of deceit.

In the absence of on‑the‑record declarations from either Hudson Williams or Connor Storrie, fans project. Some do it playfully. Others weaponise it, treating every lingering glance as a contract and every denial as betrayal.

The resurfaced clips are a quiet rebuke to that impulse. They show two young men, long before pay‑cheques and fandoms, already moving through the world in ways that confound neat categories. They also reveal something slightly uncomfortable about us: how quick we are to decide that queerness, or even the performance of it, must be a strategy rather than a facet of personality.

None of this means Heated Rivalry, or its stars, are above criticism. The show trades in fantasy; the actors benefit from that fantasy economically and socially. But the idea that they sat down one day and concocted a 'zesty' persona to snare queer viewers crumbles under the weight of an old restaurant clip and a dusty Grease video.

Sometimes, maddeningly, people are just like this.