Heated Rivalry‘s Hudson Williams defended his dad after making some surprising revelations about how his father was “very irresponsible.”
During an interview with Men’s Health, which was published on Thursday, January 15, Williams, 24, recalled that his father attempted to get him into weight training at age 6.
“My dad always kept me in the gym since I was like, 6,” the actor noted. “There’s, like, videos of him trying to put weights in my hand — which seems very irresponsible.”
Williams had mixed opinions on the decisions his dad made when he was growing up, adding, “But it’s also the guy who left me alone with lighters and, like, plastic bottles. So it’s not out of character.”
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Despite the shocking admission, Williams said his dad was a “great father” to him.
“I didn’t mean to tarnish his character,” he added. “But, yeah, I’ve been in the gym for a long time.”
Williams has offered insight into his relationship with his dad since becoming a household name following the success of his Crave series, Heated Rivalry. He opened up about relating to his character Shane — who is autistic — because of the similarities to his father.
“After reading the scripts — even before the book — I immediately saw how he would operate,” Williams told The Hollywood Reporter in December 2025. “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.”
Williams continued: “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.”
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Based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, Heated Rivalry follows rival professional hockey players Shane Hollander (Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), whose animosity on the ice is just a front for a secret — and very passionate — romance.
Following the season 1 finale, Heated Rivalry became the top-rated non-animated acquired series on HBO Max since its 2020 launch. It is also among the top five of all scripted debuts on HBO Max this year. On Crave, meanwhile, it has become the most watched original show in Canada.
Heated Rivalry has since been renewed for a second season — with Williams and Storrie, 25, planning to reprise their roles.
“[For the role] hockey players don’t usually look that jacked, and the rest are kind of just, like, wiry strong, or they look like they drink beer strong. But then I was asking [creator] Jacob [Tierney], like, ‘What should I look like?’ He was like, ‘You should look like to be pasta,’” Williams told Men’s Health about his physique for the show. “And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I’m seeing these other guys in the show, and they look like underwear models.’”
He added: “And as soon as I saw Connor Storrie, I just decided to not eat carbs and try to get as big as possible. I wanna get bigger, juicier, thicker — I wanna get some bigger legs. I wanna get some big-ass shoulders. I wanna put on 10 pounds of muscle. Unless a roll is like, you have to be skinny. Then I’ll get skinny. And I won’t eat.”
