Hudson Williams and YAGA premiere leave TIFF crowd buzzing

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YAGA, the upcoming Crave show starring Hudson Williams, Noah Reid and Carrie-Anne Moss, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday evening in a cloud of fandom for another project entirely: Heated Rivalry, which 10 months ago vaulted Williams to stratospheric levels of fame for his portrayal of closeted hockey player Shane Hollander.

While some premiere-goers sported Baba Yaga-inspired fashion – a chicken-feet handbag for YAGA creator and showrunner Kat Sandler, an ethereal black-and-gold robe for Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid – a large percentage of fans showed up to the TIFF Lightbox in garb connected to a certain gay hockey romance, whose second season is expected to land on Crave in spring of 2027.

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But by the end of YAGA’s screening, which featured the first two episodes of Sandler’s half-hour thriller, the audience was buzzing – and not only about Williams, who plays two people in Sandler’s folklore-inspired whodunit. As the audience slowly filtered out of the screening room, fans lamented having to wait until Oct. 23 for the series to land on Crave: “Yagaween” quickly became the vernacular of choice for the show’s release date.

First conceived as a play at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2019, YAGA follows a private detective (Reid) and a local cop (Clark Backo) as they investigate the disappearance of fishery heir Henry Park (Williams) in the fictional coastal town of Whittock.

Before long, the story morphs from a True Detective-style mystery to something more magical – and sinister.

Thursday’s premiere ended on a cliffhanger (no spoilers here), but during the first two episodes, the audience got a taste of Sandler’s quirky sense of humour and highly feminist approach to storytelling. (Moss, best known for her work as Trinity in The Matrix series, plays a middle-aged professor “with a taste for younger men,” per Crave’s marketing materials.)

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It was a triumphant conclusion to a Williams-themed day that kicked off with an afternoon Q&A at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. In the leadup to the event, hosted by TIFF’s vice-president of public programming Keith Bennie, long queues snaked around the theatre, with some Heated Rivalry aficionados reporting standing in line since the early morning to try and score a rush ticket. (Some fans on King Street were rewarded for their patience when Williams showed up to the theatre early, offering autographs to a lucky few members of the enormous crowd.)

Bennie’s questions covered a wide range of topics, from Williams’s coming-of-age as a young actor in Kamloops, B.C., to his early career making indie films with friends at Langara College in Vancouver.

In the Q&A, Williams shared intimate details from the Heated Rivalry set, exploring at length scenes where Shane comes out to a girlfriend and sees Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) win a championship game on TV. He also recalled being unsure what the show could lead to – while he remembered appreciating its writing during the audition process, he didn’t anticipate just how strongly Heated Rivalry would resonate with audiences.

“It’s weird that our memory of season one isn’t just our memory of showing up and doing the scenes,” he said. “It’s having watched them cut together. It’s fan reactions. Our memory isn’t ours, it’s everyone’s. It’s been abstracted and twisted, and it’s become this weird amalgamation of a memory.”

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That feeling has made returning to Shane for Heated Rivalry’s second season harder than expected, he said. (Filming is ongoing.) Both he and Storrie had a tough first day on set this year, but “it came back, thankfully,” he added. “Jacob [Tierney] does a really good job of making this set feel as tiny as it was in season one. It’s all the same crew, which is really great. But it was surreal to step into it. The only other character I’ve had to return to was Land Leopard,” he continued with a laugh, referring to his 2025 indie films Super Support and Super Support 2.

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The Q&A soon pivoted to Apparatus, his upcoming film opposite Dylan O’Brien, and YAGA. Williams praised YAGA’s “witchy feminist rage,” and recalled wondering “how the hell did they greenlight this?” Stylistically, the show is markedly different from Heated Rivalry: It’s “obviously a different world” in terms of genre, he said.

“Those were all exciting things,” he remembered. “I was constantly on the edge of my seat reading it, and I remember my team reading it, and we were like, ‘We’re almost near the end. Do you know what’s happening? No, neither do I.’ And a 30-minute episodic thriller is really interesting.”

Williams called Sandler “uncompromising” as a showrunner, and highlighted her trust in the YAGA cast to find their characters. Williams and Sandler traded voice memos and texts about his two characters, and overall, he said, the experience was highly collaborative. “That’s sort of your dream as an actor,” he said.

And the best part? Both YAGA and Apparatus, booked after the global success of Heated Rivalry, are Canadian. When posed the question of what being Canadian means to him, he quipped, “being American with manners?” before speaking more seriously.

“I was getting a lot of scripts, obviously, and when the show’s blow-up was happening, YAGA and Apparatus were just two of the coolest things that came in. It was sort of a no-brainer to simultaneously choose good projects and also get to be in Canada.”