Hudson Williams, the star of the hit hockey romance series Heated Rivalry, says he is writing a movie that features a character who is an ex-hockey player, and that he is "getting tripped up" over the parallel to the show that made him famous. He told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published ahead of the Oct. 23 premiere of Yaga, the witchy detective thriller he stars in alongside Carrie-Anne Moss.
"I'm writing a movie right now, but one character is an ex-hockey player," Williams said, according to Entertainment Weekly. "We were like, 'But if we have this hockey player and then you've done a hockey show...' We're getting tripped up on it and we're considering other sports, but for some reason this character just made way more sense being an ex-hockey player."
"It's almost like you have to bust through the prison of your own mind or construct of your own mind," he added.
The comment came up while Moss was explaining her own hang-up over a John Wick reference in Yaga. Her character, Kathryn Hargrove, brings up the franchise in a series built on the myth of the witch Baba Yaga, which is also the name of Keanu Reeves' hitman. Moss, who starred in The Matrix with Reeves, said her first instinct was that it was her friend's movie and not hers.
When EW asked Williams to say more about his project, his team declined to elaborate.
Before Rivalry, Williams wrote and directed short films, including Soakers, Buttons and Inside Augustine Mendoza's Quotidian Apartment.
Yaga premiered Oct. 23 on AMC+ in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Williams plays two roles: Henry Park, the heir to a fishery empire who goes missing, and Logan Casey, Park's roommate, who oddly looks like him. Rivalry season 2 is also filming, and Williams is set to appear in the comedic thriller Apparatus with Dylan O'Brien and the culinary thriller Tyrant with Charlize Theron, Julia Garner, Demi Moore and Omar Apollo.