The Hottest Celebs at the Golden Globes Weren't the Nominees

Sunday kicked off the segment of awards season most people pay attention to with the Golden Globes, a show that has struggled in recent years under the weight of low-viewership, poor hosting and a politically tempestuous atmosphere only some celebrities were brave enough to formally acknowledge. Something changed, this time around. Everywhere I looked, in and outside the ceremony, actors and posters alike were abuzz with gossip about those two actors from that one show seemingly everyone watched over the holiday break.

After weeks of feeling like the breakout stars of the gay hockey show were the most famous actors on the planet currently, turns out: maybe they are!

This is, in no small part, a testament to the success of a show about closeted men struggling in a repressive sports industry while standing naked in front of fireplaces and discussing smoothies with each other. It is also a testament to the magnetic power both Storrie and Williams have to pull in such massive international audiences, becoming the most-watched show ever on Crave, the Canadian streamer that spawned it.

For weeks, their combined star power has eclipsed the impending awards season, with massive crowds following them around the world and photos of them near-impossible to escape in and offline for most generally logged on individuals. Just this week, while Williams was in New York City to promote the show, crowds gathered for a glimpse literally shut down traffic around 30 Rock.

It's no surprise the energy followed him back to Los Angeles, even amongst peers. Stars are just like us, after all. They stand onstage and crack jokes about kissing, and they also sit in the audience, clapping like seals. Fascinating, that this year of all years, a show like Heated Rivalry would be the standout streaming success. The irony is both delicious and multitudinous.

While some of those clapping dilettantes might be bona fide fans of watching two guys kiss on a trashy soap, most others were desperate for a whiff of a thing that can't be so easily googled: fame. Genuine, unexpected fame of the levels not seen often in one's lifetime. The sort of fame most celebrities chase their entire careers and then grapple to, knowing it will literally never get any better than the present. A fame that is as intoxicating as it is dangerous; it is a fame that locks television actors into a single career-defining performance, endlessly churning through fan convention appearances and podcasts about hit shows from 30 years ago. It is the kind of fame that produces kings and topples them too.

More than anything, it is the fame that powers the Hollywood dream. No wonder everyone suckled up to it at the Globes like hungry vampires around a youthful virgin.

Before I continue, though, I'd like to briefly focus on women. No, not the women critics and grumps derisively snark on for buying books like Heated Rivalry. I'm talking famous women, who maybe do the same! My personal frontrunner for awards season, Teyana Taylor, took home a much-deserved statuette after a career spent proving she can do quite literally anything. PAPER cover star Mary Beth Barone likewise interviewed her on the carpet, and their chemistry was electric for me, personally. Kudos to them both!

Back to gay and bisexual men — and the actors that play them. The crowds naturally gathered en masse online, where posts about Williams and Storrie racked up magnitudes more impressions than anything else the night had to offer. From my own meager arithmetic calculations, retweets between Pop Base and their dedicated fan pages numbered in the tens of thousands, with likes bordering on a hundred thousand, with the likes being even more astronomical. Granted, it's a self-selecting sample size, and the types to obsessively pour over stan account pages and boost said stan account pages are not the average television consumer.

But then, what about those crowds waiting out in the rain and snow? What about the famous people huddled around their publicists and pap cameras? Even Gayle King joined in on the fun, remarking on the hordes of people chanting "They're coming, they're coming!" outside the W party.

Williams, knowing his role now, simply said: "We do that a lot."

I have covered awards ceremonies for nearly a decade, seeing the ebbs and flows of an industry for which the only defining trait is ephemerality. Of late, the fervor of the internet in the five years post-pandemic lockdown — which seemed to supercharge fan communities — has disrupted my predictive abilities. Like static on a cluttered radio frequency, it has grown increasingly hard to parse the distinction between algorithmically generated attention and things that are real, and can actually be felt in the world around me.

I'd like to thank the famous people of Los Angeles and beyond for cutting through that noise and validating my suspicions. What these two boys do now with any of this excess of attention is their hassle to figure out.

Images via Getty / Graphic design by Jewel Baek