Is Hudson Williams Gay? Pals Reveal Heated Rivalry Star's Bizarre 'Dogging' Role Before HBO Fame

Hudson Williams did not become famous by playing it safe. One minute he's in a shoestring short film called Dogging, in boxers and a collar, committing to the bit as a struggling actor pretending to be a dog; the next he's stepping into the sort of global spotlight that turns a young performer into a conversation, whether he asked for it or not.

That whiplash is the point of USA TODAY's portrait of the 24-year-old breakout star of Heated Rivalry: a pre-fame life built on late nights, favours, and the kind of creative hunger you can't fake for long. It's also a reminder that the internet, which now treats his face like communal property, is very good at arriving after the hard work is done.​

Hudson Williams and the Work Before the Work

Before Heated Rivalry became one of the most watched series of 2025 — and kept its grip into 2026 — Williams was waiting tables at an Italian restaurant in Vancouver while writing, directing and acting in short films made with friends at Langara College.

Those early projects were stitched together on shoestring budgets, the kind of scrappy filmmaking that runs on borrowed kit and stubbornness, and they've since racked up hundreds of thousands of views as curious new fans go digging.

A friend, Zack Fonzovs, remembered meeting Williams in December 2021 when he needed a male lead, then giving him a frankly wild instruction: 'You're going to bite off her finger and suck it like it's the blood of Christ.' Fonzovs told USA TODAY it was 'a very profane moment' and that Williams seemed ready to do it instantly — proof, in his eyes, of how 'passionate' and 'hungry' the actor was. The line is so obscene it almost becomes useful: it captures an attitude that's hard to teach, that willingness to risk looking ridiculous if the scene demands it.​

That same restlessness shows up in the way Williams kept making things even after the industry noticed him. USA TODAY reports he has a YouTube channel where — by Feb. 4 — he'd posted four short films and amassed more than 50,900 subscribers, with three of those films starring Williams himself. Checking the channel now, the subscriber count has climbed further, the digital paper trail of a career that didn't begin on a red carpet but on a timeline.

Hudson Williams and the Fame Machine's Questions

If the story were only 'talented lad makes good,' it would be pleasant but forgettable. What makes it stick is how quickly the public has moved from watching Hudson Williams to appraising him, and then — inevitably — trying to own him.​

Williams' character in Heated Rivalry is a secretly queer hockey player, and the series' success has pushed its stars into the kind of scrutiny that collapses the boundary between role and reality. The piece you've been given even arrives wrapped in the nosiest question of all — 'Is Hudson Williams gay?' — as if an actor's private life is a loose thread the public is entitled to tug until something comes undone.

Here's the honest answer available in the reporting: the USA TODAY profile is about his work ethic, his friendships, his early films and the speed of his rise, not a verified declaration of his personal identity. And perhaps that's as it should be, because there's something queasy about how fame encourages a kind of amateur entitlement — people demanding 'the truth' about a stranger's interior life as if it's bonus content.

The numbers, though, are real enough. USA TODAY reports that as of Feb. 4 the series averaged 9 million viewers per episode in the United States, a figure confirmed to the publication by Warner Bros. Discovery.

The show's feverish reception has also spilled into the obsessive corners of online ratings: Forbes reported that episode five, 'I'll Believe in Anything,' briefly hit a perfect 10/10 rating on IMDb, tying Breaking Bad's 'Ozymandias' as the only TV episodes to achieve that mark at the time. PinkNews likewise reported the same perfect-score moment, while IMDb's page for the episode currently lists it at 9.9/10.

What Williams seems to understand — perhaps sooner than most — is that a rapid ascent doesn't only bring opportunities; it compresses the learning curve. Variety quoted him describing the pace of it all: 'Connor and I have had to grasp what many actors typically learn over five years within just 30 days.' That line lands because it isn't self-pity. It's the sound of someone noticing the machinery while still being carried along by it.