It’s the question Heated Rivalry fans have been circling for almost a year, and on Sunday night, viewers finally got to watch someone ask Hudson Williams to his face.
“Did you ever feel something for Connor that was more than friendship?”
The person asking was Nate, one of the autistic and neurodivergent interviewers on CBC’s The Assembly. The Connor in question is Connor Storrie, who plays Ilya to Hudson’s Shane, shares a matching tattoo with him and calls him his best friend.
Hudson had already heard the rules. No subject is out of bounds, no question is off the table. “I’m strapped in,” he’d told the room. “My knees are bent.”
What he said next involved 10 hours of cuddling, a phrase he made up on the spot and, somehow, his shower.
It wasn’t even the only Connor question that day. Another interviewer wanted to know how the two of them got their butts ready for TV.
The Interview Show Where Nothing Is Off The Table
The Assembly hands celebrities over to a group of more than 30 autistic and neurodivergent adults, who ask whatever they like. The format started in France as Les Rencontres du Papotin. Last season, Howie Mandel got asked which parts of his body he shaves besides his head.
Hudson opened season 2, and the booking made sense. Shane Hollander is on the spectrum, and so is Hudson’s father.
CBC put Nate’s question in the trailer it released in mid-October and held back the answer. Fans had more than two weeks to speculate.
“Platonic Soulmates,” And A Saying That Isn’t One
“Um, no,” Hudson began. “Quickly, me and Connor realized we were, like, platonic soulmates, just completely in love with each other.”
That, he said, is why the friendship is so stable: the two of them could drop their guard completely. Then he tried to explain what that looks like in practice.
“Me and that man could cuddle for 10 hours,” he said, and it would just mean cuddling. They love each other dearly, he went on, “but don’t wanna beep each other’s bop.”
“That’s not a saying,” he added, as the room cracked up.
It should be.
Then He Brought Up The Shower
A careful actor would have stopped there. Hudson kept going.
“But yeah, who doesn’t want Connor Storrie in their shower, you know?” he asked.
His reasoning was purely practical, of course. “I have a loofah, but I can’t reach,” he explained. “If I had Connor with me every day, he could just come in there.”
Nate told him it had been great talking to him, and the mic moved on.
The Butt Question Was Somehow Better
Earlier in the episode, an interviewer named Dylan had gone straight to the workout plan. “You and Connor had to work hard preparing your butts for TV,” Dylan said. “How did you do that?”
The answer was a lot of Bulgarian split squats, Hudson’s least favorite exercise and one he’d normally skip. Then the reality of the job hit him: “Oh, my butt’s going to be on screen. Got to do them.” He was still doing what he called “my little banded walks” in his hotel room while they shot the show.
Some of the pressure came from his scene partner. Everyone has seen Connor’s butt, he pointed out. “It’s like two moons, you know?”
The work isn’t over, either. “I think my butt’s also on season two,” he said, realizing out loud that he had to get back to the gym. He and Connor are filming that season now.
His Mom Watched Episode 1 With A Warning System
When an interviewer named Jazzy announced a question about his sex life, Hudson replied, “Hell yeah.” Jazzy wanted to know how he felt about friends and family seeing those scenes.
He was “pumped,” he said. He’d worried before shooting that the scenes might come across as exploitative, but they turned out tender, and he decided this would be “the best friend screening ever.”
So he sat 12 or 13 friends and his mom down to watch the first episode, which, as he put it, “is a lot.” The friends brought party horns and blew them whenever things got provocative. “Mom, cover,” he’d tell her. When the noise stopped, she knew it was safe to look again.
Why He Says The Rest Is “Not My Business”
Hudson and Connor have been fielding some version of Nate’s question since the press tour began. Last December, Connor told Variety it was revealing that a hand on a friend’s leg instantly gets turned into “They’re more than friends.” Hudson told Deadline he never wanted to stop showing his love for Connor physically.
They’ve also been protecting their separate careers. Hudson told Wonderland in January that they actively avoid turning up at the same fashion shows, because “we don’t want to be the Olsen twins.” His new witchy mystery series Yaga premiered in October, with no Connor in sight.
In a clip CBC Gem posted ahead of the premiere, an interviewer named Alexis asked about viewers developing parasocial relationships with him. Some people, Hudson said, are “living so vicariously through this fictional thing” that it’s more real to them than anything else in their lives. He compared it to fans demanding to know why Jack and Rose aren’t together: “it’s like they’re actors.”
Then he quoted Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney: “Shane and Ilya are for everyone. Hudson and Connor are for themselves.”
How much Connor shares with the world, Hudson said, is up to Connor. “You kind of just gotta be like, not my business.”
He’s had to draw the same line around his personal life. Hudson’s girlfriend, tattoo artist Katelyn Rose Larson, did many of the tattoos he showed off at the start of the episode, including a set of teeth based on the underbite of his late dog, Jesse Skywalker Williams. In September, she asked fans to stop booking appointments with her purely because of the show.
The Moment That Closed The Episode
The rest of the half hour wasn’t all jokes. Hudson talked about lashing out as a kid who was left alone a lot, and about how “the Korean in me” still tells him to just work harder instead of going back on ADHD medication. Asked about his father, he remembered his dad once telling him, “Your mom relates more with human and I relate more with Vulcan.” Yes, the Star Trek aliens.
Hudson told the group these were the best questions he’d been asked in his life. When a few of them surprised him with an a cappella version of All the Things She Said, from the Heated Rivalry soundtrack, he said he had goosebumps before they even started singing.
Nate’s question came back around at the very end. As the interview wrapped, one member of the group told Hudson that he has a guy he loves too: his best friend, Colin.
“That’s lovely,” Hudson told him. “It’s so important to have that.”