Hudson Williams and the accidental reinvention of the Asian male lead
I wasn’t watching the Golden Globes. I was doing what most people do now, catching up on fragments of it through Threads and Instagram, scrolling past the expected parade of polished acceptance speeches and carefully coordinated outfits. Then I stopped.
As you could see in the Youtube video, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie had just walked onto the stage to Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” Connor feigned nerves. Hudson, deadpan, told him to picture everyone in the audience naked. Connor paused, then pointed out that probably wouldn’t work, given that everyone had already seen them naked. Hudson didn’t miss a beat: their trainers had seen the show. Their moms had. Their daughters had. “Hi moms,” he said, with the ease of someone who had absolutely nothing to prove.
The room erupted.
And I found myself watching a young Asian man stand under the Golden Globes lights, completely unguarded, received by white-dominated Hollywood with genuine delight — and looking like nothing the industry had ever deliberately produced. He hadn’t been media-trained into blandness. He hadn’t distanced himself from the show’s fanbase to seem more serious, more Hollywood, more palatable. He’d arrived exactly as he was, from exactly where he came from.
I started wondering: how did he get here? And what does it mean that he did?
Before the Golden Globes, there was The Old Spaghetti Factory in New Westminster, British Columbia. Tables to wait. Rent to cover. A city, as Hudson would later put it, more expensive than Los Angeles.
But here’s what the origin story usually glosses over: he wasn’t waiting to be discovered. He was already making things. Writing, directing, acting in short films with friends from Langara College, scrappy productions with no budget and no audience, made purely because he couldn’t not make them. The creativity wasn’t something fame unlocked. It was already fully formed, running quietly in the background of a life that had no particular reason to go anywhere extraordinary.
Heated Rivalry didn’t create Hudson Williams. It just gave the rest of the world a reason to look.
And when it did — when HBO picked up a low-budget queer Canadian hockey drama that had no business travelling as far as it did — what the world found wasn’t a star being manufactured. It was someone who had already done the work, on his own terms, long before anyone was paying attention.
That distinction matters. Because it changes what his story is actually about.
Hollywood has always known what a leading man looks like. Brad Pitt. Timothée Chalamet. Jacob Elordi. The white-European ideal that the industry returns to, reliably, as its default setting for desire and stardom.
Asian men have occasionally been permitted entry, but on much stricter terms. The opportunities given to Simu Liu and Henry Golding were real and hard-won, but they came with an unspoken condition: don’t fail. A white leading man can have three flops and still find himself back on a major studio slate. The failure gets absorbed by the system. For an Asian leading man, a misstep tends to be read differently — not as a bad film, but as evidence that audiences simply don’t connect with someone who looks like him. The margin for error is not the same.
What’s quietly remarkable about Hudson Williams is that he never had to negotiate those terms. The industry didn’t get to decide whether to bet on him. By the time Hollywood was paying attention, the audience had already decided — and the audience, it turned out, was enormous.
He arrived through a door nobody was guarding. A low-budget queer Canadian drama, a domestic streamer, a story about ice hockey. Nothing about that pipeline said future leading man. And yet, here is the thing about Hudson Williams that makes him genuinely difficult to categorise: he doesn’t look like what Hollywood expects an Asian male lead to look like, and he doesn’t behave like it either.
As someone who grew up inside Asian beauty standards, I find myself doing something strange when I look at him. His nose, the high bridge, the wide pupils — these don’t register as typically Asian to me. But his colouring does, his hair does. He doesn’t resolve neatly into any single template. And that visual illegibility, I suspect, is part of why the industry received him the way it did — with delight rather than the usual cautious calculation. They didn’t quite know what box to put him in. So they just let him exist.
Which, for an Asian man in Hollywood, is rarer than it sounds.
There is a particular kind of Asian male star that China has historically preferred: slight, fair, large-eyed, what is known as 小鲜肉, or “little fresh meat.” Simu Liu, for all his undeniable magnetism and charm, never quite fit that template. His northern-eastern Chinese features — strong, broad, blunt in the best sense — read as handsome to Western eyes but didn’t quite translate easily across the Pacific. Two very different ideals of masculine beauty, and he satisfied one without satisfying the other.
Hudson sits, almost improbably, at the intersection of both.
He is tall enough, muscular enough, conventionally handsome enough for Western audiences raised on a particular idea of a leading man. But he also has the large eyes, the high-bridged nose, the clear skin, the quality of being simultaneously strong and pretty that East Asian beauty standards have always prized. He doesn’t maximise for either culture. He lands, almost accidentally, exactly in the middle — and both sides of the world seem to have found something familiar and relatable in him.
Part of this is his heritage. Born to a Korean mother, Hudson carries the K-wave’s cultural momentum without arriving as a K-wave product. Western audiences have spent a decade being quietly educated by BTS, by Parasite, by the global spread of Korean aesthetics. Their eyes have been trained, without their necessarily knowing it, to find a certain kind of Korean beauty legible and desirable. Hudson benefits from that expanded vocabulary without being reducible to it. He isn’t a K-drama star crossing over. He’s something the industry doesn’t have a name for yet.
And then there is who he is off-screen, which, in East Asian cultures, is never truly separate from the public persona (see Jackie Chan and his reputation in Hong Kong). How a man treats the women around him is character evidence, not private information. Hudson brings his mum to important functions, apparently without being advised to. He has been with his girlfriend since before fame found him, whom he had publicly acknowledged and showed gratitude for. He shows the kind of loyalty that in Western celebrity culture reads as refreshingly grounded, and in East Asian culture reads as something deeper: a proof of who he actually is. He became a global heartthrob and didn’t reinvent himself to match the moment.
In a system that usually asks people to choose — be legible to us, or be legible to them — Hudson Williams appears to have simply declined the choice.
Where Hudson Williams goes from here is still being written. The scripts are piling up. The agency is CAA now, not The Old Spaghetti Factory. He has walked runways in Milan, attended the Met Gala, wielded the Olympic torch. The world that didn’t know his name two years ago can’t seem to stop saying it.
What he represents — a new kind of Asian male lead, unbeholden to any single cultural template, arrived without permission— is still unfolding. Hollywood has a habit of eventually finding a box for people it didn’t design. Whether it does that to Hudson Williams, or whether he continues to resist easy categorisation, remains to be seen.
But here is what I keep coming back to: none of this was planned. Not by a studio, not by a diversity initiative, not by any industry calculation about what audiences were ready for. A mixed-heritage kid from Kamloops was making short films on no budget in Vancouver because he couldn’t not make them. He took a leap of faith on a small queer hockey drama and quit his day job. The audience found him, the way audiences sometimes find exactly what they needed without knowing they were looking.
That’s not how the system is supposed to work. But sometimes, it’s exactly how it does.
One thing I’ve seen happens in this fandom- and honestly sometimes in real life discussions about Hudson too- is that people end up flattening all POC experiences into one universal experience.
Race absolutely matters. Racism absolutely exists. But different racial groups are stereotyped in different ways, and those stereotypes can produce completely different social expectations.
For example, I’ve seen people criticize Rachel and Jacob for joking about Hudson being unintelligent because he’s a person of color. If Hudson were Black, I would understand that criticism more, because there is a long history of anti-Black stereotypes portraying Black people as unintelligent. But Hudson is Asian. Asian men are stereotyped in almost the opposite way. They’re often assumed to be intelligent, studious, and academically successful. The stereotype is still racist, but it’s a different stereotype. It doesn’t suddenly become an anti-Asian stereotype just because we’ve replaced “Asian” with the broader category of “POC.”
The same thing happens constantly in fanfiction with Shane.
A lot of writers portray Shane as being afraid to fight because he knows he’ll be judged more harshly than white players. I understand where that idea is coming from, but as a black person I’ve never found it particularly convincing.
If Shane were black, that analysis would make more sense to me. Black men are often stereotyped as aggressive, which means behavior that is considered acceptable from white athletes is often interpreted differently when black ones do it.
But asian men occupy a very different place in the racial imagination. They’re frequently stereotyped as passive, non-threatening, weak, nerdy, emasculated, etc. If racial stereotypes were influencing Shane’s approach to hockey, I could just as easily imagine the opposite dynamic: feeling pressure to prove he’s aggressive enough to belong. Maybe he’s fighting TOO much.
But that doesn’t make sense for Shane. He’s the league’s golden boy. He’s polite, media-friendly, and heavily inspired by Sidney Crosby. He’s a superstar. Fighting is often delegated to players lower on the depth chart whose role is specifically to provide physicality. Star players generally aren’t expected to be enforcers. Teams usually want their elite talent scoring goals, not sitting in the penalty box after dropping the gloves.
So Shane not fighting much doesn’t strike me as evidence of racial pressure. It strikes me as evidence that he’s Shane Hollander.
Crosby is a useful comparison here. For years, people mocked him for not being physical enough (and for talking to the refs too much). They questioned his toughness and masculinity. They called him “Crybaby Crosby” or “Cindy Crosby.” Fans edited photos of him in dresses or makeup. The criticism wasn’t really about hockey. The joke was that he wasn’t a “real man.”
And that’s a white player.
Imagine how much worse those conversations could become if the player in question were Asian.
That’s the kind of racial dynamic I could actually see affecting Shane, not him worrying about people thinking he’s too aggressive, but people questioning whether he’s aggressive ENOUGH.
There’s a good chance that if Shane fought exactly like many white players, he probably still wouldn’t be viewed as tough enough. Meanwhile, if a Black player fought exactly like those same white players, he might be interpreted as more aggressive.
People often criticize Rachel for not doing much racial analysis in the books. But sometimes fandom fills that gap with racial analysis that feels disconnected from both hockey culture and the specific stereotypes that affect different racial groups.
Not every POC experience is interchangeable.
A stereotype that affects Black athletes is not automatically a stereotype that affects Asian athletes. A stereotype that affects Latino athletes is not automatically a stereotype that affects Indigenous athletes.
If we’re going to talk about race- and we should- we have to talk about the actual racial dynamics at play, not just substitute “person of color” for a more specific analysis.
Sometimes no racial analysis is better than bad racial analysis.
Ok i saw a comment that was probably in good faith speculation talking about organised crime being responsible for the Hudson hate and I just want to nip this in the bud and say -
White fans, please stop reaching for obscure reasons that might explain motivation when it's racism.
It is very very clear that just as Hudson's meteoric rise is unprecedented BECAUSE racism has prevented other actors of colour for being rewarded for their talent and charm, so too the unprecedented hate is merely a larger version of the background hate that accompanies any non-white excellence.
Racism is why he's unique and not one among many Asian superstars, and racism is why whiteness wants to punish him for it.
And if you wish to support him you must stop focusing on his charm and looks and sweetness and humour as though that makes him uniquely deserving of protection from racism.
You MUST talk about racism as the primary structural force at work here because it is what is harming every working non- white actor. (Please remember how Aika and Leilani have been treated. And Ksenia overlooked.)
This is not unprecedented. It is just magnified to a degree that makes it visible to the white eye. Notice it and name it as racism.
I was thinking about this too. That kind of rise to fame is so quick that the racists just can’t handle it. And they especially hate how big his fandom has become, hence the nonstop ongoing smear campaigns one after another.
There never was any other Asian Diaspora actor in Hollywood that has ever gotten this much mainstream popularity and fandom and all over one day basically. I’d say that him being part white and more palpable for white gaze and white beauty standards helps with getting more fans (including white fans) than an actor of color would usually get. But he’s still not white passing, so that pisses the racist haters even more.
And like you said, because his fandom is big and diverse, white fans who usually don’t see fandom racism are finally seeing it.
At this point this isn’t even about Hudson Williams, but about the way racists would fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo and not let any actor of color have this much fandom and popularity. It’s fascinating really.
Dropping in to suggest adding Eve Polastri and Kitty Song Covey on your list of lgbtq+ Asian characters if they aren't already 🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽
Hi! Thanks! Yeah, I know about them, I just haven't updated that list for five or more years now. When I made that list back in 2015 (!) there was just a handful of characters that I could name off the top of my head and now, thankfully, that list has probably grown x10 times longer, so there is no real need to update it.
It doesn't mean of course that things are all sunshine and rainbows with our rep, especially at these times, but it's still nice to look back to when I started this blog in 2015 and see how far we've come in a decade.
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