Two shirtless men in a dim room, foreheads pressed together, close enough to kiss. One of them is Heated Rivalry‘s Shane Hollander himself, Hudson Williams.
The other, if you ask the fans who’ve been pausing the clip since it dropped, is Patrick Brewer from Schitt’s Creek.
The moment lasts about a second. It comes from a new teaser for Yaga, Hudson’s witchy mystery series, released by Australian streamer Binge ahead of the show’s October 23 premiere. The man fans are convinced they see is Noah Reid, who spent four seasons as David Rose’s buttoned-up boyfriend and, eventually, husband. And the shippers have already landed on a couple name: Hudnoah.
That’s a lot of ship to build on one dark second of footage. Then again, the theory has more going for it than you’d think.
The Yaga Teaser Fans Keep Pausing
The new clip runs about 30 seconds, and it doesn’t waste many of them. Carrie-Anne Moss opens it with an offer: “If you give me a kiss, I will tell you a secret that will save your life.”
What follows is mostly Hudson. He’s in bed with a red-haired woman, then locked in a kiss under blue light, then in that shirtless, forehead-to-forehead stare-down with another man. After that the clip swerves into horror: a missing poster with Henry’s face on it, a grinning old witch, and the question “Who is the devil?” The answer: “Baba Yaga.”
That two-man shot is the one everyone’s talking about. Out and a lot of fans describe Hudson getting a grip on Noah’s neck. In the cut we watched, it’s too dark and quick to make out much beyond two bare chests and a lot of very intense eye contact, and the second man’s face stays half turned away. So “it’s Noah” is, for now, a fan verdict rather than an official one. Nobody seems remotely bothered.
Wait, Who Is Noah Reid Playing?
Noah plays Rapp, a private investigator who arrives in the small coastal town of Whittock to find Henry Park, the missing young heir to a powerful fishery. Henry is Hudson’s character, so in theory the two spend the show looking for each other.
It gets more tangled. In September the show revealed that Hudson is playing a second character, Logan, who wears glasses and seems to have a very different energy from Henry. Logan doesn’t exist in Kat Sandler’s original 2019 play, which the series is based on. Fans are still arguing about whether he’s a twin, a double or something more supernatural.
Then there’s the detail that makes the Hudnoah theory even funnier. According to TV Insider, the play’s stage directions have one actor playing both Rapp, the investigator, and Henry, the missing student. The two men fans are shipping were, on stage, literally the same guy.
The rest of the town isn’t exactly calm either. Moss plays Katherine, “a charismatic university professor with a taste for younger men,” and earlier trailers already showed her sharing a kiss with Hudson. Clark Backo plays Carson, the local detective who isn’t thrilled to see Rapp turn up.
From Patrick Brewer To “Scary Hot”
For anyone who skipped Schitt’s Creek: Patrick helped David Rose open his store and became his business partner, then his boyfriend. He serenaded David with an acoustic “Simply the Best” and married him in the series finale. Their wedding kiss is on our list of the best gay kisses on TV, and it earned the spot.
Patrick was sweet. Noah, it turns out, has been enjoying the much less sweet energy on Yaga. When the first teaser screened at San Diego Comic-Con in July, he told the crowd, as Instinct reported, that Hudson “cannot keep his hands off himself. I mean, I don’t blame him.”
He also called his co-star’s turn “a wild performance that is scary hot,” adding: “I think anyone who knows Hudson’s work from Heated Rivalry is in for an interesting ride.”
Hudson, for his part, seems pretty relaxed about how much kissing the job involved. At a Yaga Q&A, he joked that he “got to kiss 10 more people and crew members so that was a little bonus,” Out reported.
The double role was harder work. At the Q&A after the show’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere in September, he said prepping two characters at once was “sort of like trying to catch like two rabbits at once, and then both get away,” Show Snob reported.
Fans Have Already Named Them Hudnoah
Binge posted the teaser on Instagram on the evening of October 6, US time, and X took it from there. By the next morning, “Hudnoah” was all over the Heated Rivalry corner of the timeline, and the neck moment had become the main event.
Plenty of fans skipped straight to shipping. “let noah reid make out with hudson he clearly wants to,” one wrote. Another decided Noah’s Comic-Con gushing finally made sense: “Now it makes sense why Noah is so obsessed with Hudson 🤣🤣😍”
The running joke treats the pairing like something fans ordered off a menu. “Can they please stop perceiving my Hudnoah meal? It’s a niche thing,” one posted. Someone else declared “hudnoah stocks at an all-time high.” A few even announced they were abandoning HudCon, the ship for Hudson and his Heated Rivalry co-star Connor Storrie: “bye hudcon i usher in hudnoah 😍😍”
One fan built a six-degrees chain that started with “hudson williams kissing noah reid who kissed dan levy,” ran through a string of other actors and landed exactly where you’d expect: “SO BASICALLY HUDSON KISSED CONNOR??”
The biggest laughs, though, were about how many people Hudson gets to kiss in general.
The double role gave fans extra material. “hudson williams reading the yaga script and seeing his character gets to make out with boys and girls and himself,” one wrote. Another invented an entire sidewalk encounter with Henry Park, explaining why they didn’t stop him: “If he was with Logan I would have.”
When Yaga Premieres
Yaga premieres with two episodes on Friday, October 23. It streams on AMC+ in the US, Crave in Canada, Binge in Australia and Sky in the UK, with HBO Max carrying it across much of Europe. The eight half-hour episodes then drop weekly until a two-episode finale on November 27.
The cast also has a panel at New York Comic Con on October 9, so more footage could be on the way before the premiere.
Heated Rivalry season 2 isn’t due until April 2027. Until then, Yaga‘s run through November 27 will have to keep the Hudnoah crowd fed.