Hudson Williams: Shane Hollander understander of all times
"I fell in love with Shane immediately. I mean, I was falling in love with him even when I read the sides, which were just the audition... like, two scenes I got for the audition. By the time I finished reading episode 6, I was crying. I felt like no one else was allowed to play him. I needed to play him."
"Shane is very affable, even though he's sort of a departure from myself. As much anxiety as I have, Shane has quadruple, tenfold more, and it's just pouring out of him at all times. And that was fun to play, even if sometimes my stomach hurt. I always thought of him as sort of this pretty, neurotic character; this little concoction of this flowery, determined, sort of alpha in some ways, or sort of wanting to appear so, and then just this pretty little sensitive painting in other ways."
"I had Heated Rivalry read, and then read again, and annotated many times, on my Kindle."
"After reading Jacob's scripts, even before the book, I immediately saw how he would operate. 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. 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 Shanel is autistic, so I think I knew how it should look. I empathized with him a lot immediately."
"Shane is hyper competent at this one thing. He's stereotypically masculine in a lot of regards. He's a kind person, and he's so overtly Canadian. He's harboring something that he thinks is a career-ending secret because he just doesn't have the emotional maturity or societal maturity to sort of understand what his own queerness means. To him, it's most likely detrimental, which is the wrong assumption to some degree, but it shatters his own idea of what his masculinity is, or at least it cripples it. And yet, he still never harms a fly."
"Shane is like a giant wooden suit with not too many articulating joints. I love him dearly, but he is exhausting because although it's my accent to a degree, it's not my voice. I'm very expressive, I'm loud, and he is tight-lipped and tight-throated, and he walks like a little frickin' square. He's like a Roomba, and has the emotional expression of one as well. So it's exhausting, but the friction is also sort of liberating in a sense that I can just be very sardonic and not necessarily earnest all the time. I'm trying to work at that. Even if Shane just says "you're an asshole" or "fuck you," his heart is on his sleeve no matter what. It's just pure earnestness and a real lack of ability to articulate himself into a lie or a less truthful place. His heart is always in his eyes, and that is kind of refreshing to be in, but it's also scary."
"Sometimes I think people might not like him, but it's like, "Oh, I hope people understand him." This is someone who's very close to me. These are family members. These are friends. These are neurodivergent people I know very well. So I'm also scared for him because a lot of the time I'm like, do I make him more cinematic and more sellable and more of a charismatic performance? Shane is not charismatic. There's a wardrobe person on set who said, "Hudson, you're hot as hell, but Shane's unfuckable." And I was like, "Well, yeah, I guess that's Shane."
"Shane feels very much like my father in a lot of ways. Thinking of him while playing Shane, that was a part of the build, the very first ingredients. I think I said my dad has a boyish quality, but he's also mechanical. Shane is boyish, but he's also mechanical. Getting to live with that, be frustrated by that, be frustrated by the restrictions of it, it just made me feel even more empathy and love for my dad."
"To cry in someone's arms is possibly the most intimate thing I think a human can do, let alone bare your heart on your sleeve and have to look someone in the eye. It's terrifying for me, and I'm an actor and my job is to be some soapy bitch. But for Shane, it is like death."
"Shane is not the most observant fella. He doesn't even have a gaydar. So I think Scott was someone he admired and represents the guy who's done it and been in the league-macho, competent. And to see that guy kissing smoothie boy on screen in front of millions of watchers is like a little pressure off his shoulders of going, "Okay, this makes this a little less scary. I'm not sure I'm going to do that, but I'm glad someone did."
"Shane's on the spectrum so he has to be specific."
"And then also the scene where, it's very sweet, when Shane mentions that they can start a mental health organization. I don't think Shane knows how sweet that is to Ilya. I think it kind of comes from Shane's pragmatism and he's sort of thinking, well, this was good and Ilya will appreciate this, but I don't think he knows to the extent."
"And then the final nail through the fucking skull in my eyes was the scene with Yuna. That was the scene that felt the most pointed in my upbringing. You know, Asian family... There were some stereotypes that are true, in my experience and a lot of Asian kids' reality. Perfection, discipline, a lack of straying left and right meant a lot of old, outdated conventions and old biases. Being gay is one of them. So having that release... I didn't know at that point if Yuna would tell him, "Okay, well, do you want to be a part of this family or not? You're not going to be talking about that again." To the degree of which she brought him in and said, "That's okay," really just sent me."
"Shane and Ilya get their ending, but as a reader bringing in my own experience of what that sort of overbearing mother means and the fears that it comes along with, this is the looming anxiety that carries Shane through all those seasons, all those years. "What would my mom think? What would my dad think? Holy fuck, I am breaking their idea of this perfect little image of a hockey player I have built over these years and sort of fabricated, to a degree."
"No, Shane does not know he's autistic. Although autism has always existed, the idea of it being a spectrum... that conversation started to reach me in a more open, accepted way in like 2017, 2018. I kind of forget the exact dates of when our show wraps up, but the overlap would probably be nearing the end of where we leave them in Heated Rivalry And I don't think Shane would be having those conversations in his social circles."
"He would need to go to a therapist, and Ilya is the only one in therapy in season two. And I don't think either of Shane's parents are the type to be like, "There's a spectrum. You're on it." They just think he's driven and antisocial. To me, reading the scripts, it didn't even have to be acknowledged. I was like, "This guy is farther along the spectrum than a lot of people." And I kind of aw, even how the dialog was written, how it manifests. Sometimes autism's portrayed in movies with quirky head movements, weird blinks, and weird inflections. And it's like, Okay...? That is sometimes truthful but that's always the reach. That's always the way it's expressed. And it's like, No, sometimes it is flat affect. It's just being immobile in your seat and taking 10 seconds to move your hand to do something because you don't know what this movement looks like or means."
"Shane is not a talker. In our show, he talks very little, and so we need to kind of set that up. Even Shane just coming up to him and saying, "Ilya Rozanov?" is huge, and it needs to be huge for the rest of the show."
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