Heated Rivalry breakout star Hudson Williams has opened up about heartfelt messages he has received from closeted professional athletes after the hockey romance series took the internet by storm.
The 24-year-old actor, who plays closeted gay hockey player Shane Hollander in the hit Crave/HBO Max book adaptation, revealed the touching effect the show has had on closeted LGBTQ+ athletes across multiple sports while speaking to Andy Cohen in an interview set to air Thursday.
“The people who reach out, somewhat anonymously, who are like, ‘I'm a professional player still, and I'm still in the closet,’” Williams said on Cohen’s SiriusXM show Radio Andy. He said that it is not just closeted hockey players who are moved by the story, which follows his and actor Connor Storrie’s characters as two secretly gay and bisexual professional hockey players as they navigate a romance amid their careers.
“Hockey players, football players, basketball players, yeah,” he said. “So, then they're reaching out to Rachel [Reid], our author, who will then kind of relay these lovely anonymous emails. And sometimes they're just reaching out privately through, like, Instagram. And those ones are the ones that really just kind of hit you and go, ‘Oh, so this is a fun show, and it's celebratory, but also sometimes it's just hitting people right in the nerve.’”
Heated Rivalry’s season one finale aired last month, bringing an end to the six weeks that skyrocketed the show to record-breaking fame. The series, based on Reid’s book series Game Changers, has already been renewed for a second season.
While the viral series has landed late night talk show spots, multiple shoutouts during CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage, and over a million Instagram followers for both of its leads, it has also sparked debate about the stigma that remains around sexuality in the professional sports realm.
There has never been an openly gay NHL player. The closest instance has been Luke Prokop, who became the first player under contract with an NHL team to come out as gay in 2021. However, Prokop plays with an affiliate AHL team and has not made it into the NHL.
“I want to make sure I’m doing everything in my power to make sure that I get, hopefully, an opportunity to get in the NHL one day,” Prokop recently told the New York Times. “With hockey and the LGBTQ community, it’s tricky. You don’t want to do too much to draw attention to it, where some teams might say, ‘Oh, we view that as a distraction. So, we don’t want them on our team.’ There’s been instances where that’s come up.”
While Heated Rivalry fans might hope for more representation on the ice in the series’ aftermath, Brock McGillis — a Canadian former ice hockey goaltender and one of the first professional hockey players to come out as gay in 2016 — recently shared that he worries the response to the show might have the opposite of the intended effect.
“It's probably more likely to have an adverse effect on a player coming out,” McGillis told LGBTQ news site PinkNews Monday. “And I hate to be negative because I really enjoy the show. But I also don't believe that many hockey bros are going to watch it. And I don't think, if they are watching it, they're talking about it positively.”
