One day Hudson Williams is attending Giorgio Armani’s fashion show at Milan Fashion Week, the next he’s posing in a lacey red thong on a magazine cover, and now he’s being fawned over by the Canadian Prime Minister.
Williams, who stars as closeted hockey player Shane Hollander in Heated Rivalry, is going viral because of a playful interaction he had with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney when the two men met on the red carpet at the Canadian Media Producers Association’s (CMPA) annual Prime Time conference in Ottawa yesterday.
Heated Rivalry has been attracting overwhelming attention since the moment the first episode dropped, with fans and celebrities alike fawning over stars Williams and Connor Storrie, but now even politicians can’t get enough of the popular gay hockey romance.
While on the red carpet, Williams gifted Carney the fleece jacket adorned with maple leaves that his character wore on the show, before Carney was caught on camera saying “Do the leg thing,” which prompted Williams to grab Carney around the waist and lift his leg so Carney could grab his thigh as they posed for photos.
Carney also congratulated Heated Rivalry creators Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady for turning down funding from U.S. execs who wanted to tone down the gay sex scenes in the show.
“What’s the point in that?” Carney said to laughs from the audience. “Jacob did the right thing. He did the smart thing. He came home to Canada. He came home to a nation that celebrates what makes us different.”
He also called Williams his “new best friend” and praised the show for its queer representation. “They’re also two young men who are terrified of being their fullest selves,” Carney said. “And we live in an increasingly dangerous, divided and intolerant world and the hard-fought rights of the 2SLGBTQI+ community are under threat.”
But it was the flirty moment with the leader of Canada that had the entire internet laughing and thirsting after Williams even more than before!
