Heated Rivalry has taken over the world, and for its stars, that’s a lot to process.

The Canadian TV show about rival hockey players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) premiered on HBO Max in December and quickly broke records for the streamer, launching Williams and Storrie into stardom.

But the series has also brought the spotlight back to François Arnaud, who plays hockey player Scott Hunter, the subject of the first book in Rachel Reid’s book series from which the show was adapted. Scott is also the subject of one of the show’s episodes — which charts his love story with Kip (Robbie Graham-Kuntz) — and quickly became just as beloved among fans as Williams and Storrie.

“At times, it feels a bit overwhelming,” Arnaud, 40, told PEOPLE of the success of what started as a small production in Canada last year.

“There’s certainly a lot of excitement. I’m not going to complain that I did something that people are interested in talking about, and this is ultimately what you do it for, right?” he said on the red carpet at the 2026 Critics Choice Awards on Jan. 4 “To reach people and to be in their homes and generate conversation.”

He’s at the point where he’s “trying to not look at my DMs” though, “because some of them are a bit intense.”

There’s one message, however, that he couldn’t ignore. “There’s a wide span of reactions to it,” Arnaud said of the show. “Some people, like Busy Philipps, reacted to it in such a genuine, warm way.”

“She’s someone that I used to watch when I was young, like [as] a kid, in Freaks and Geeks,” he continued of Philipps, 46, who posted a video of herself sobbing after watching the penultimate episode of Heated Rivalry on Instagram on Dec. 30.

“I love you Heated Rivalry,” she wrote in the caption. “Thank you for bringing it home so hard.”

As someone he’s “admired for so long,” Arnaud said Philipps’ support of him and the show “is really meaningful.”

As for the impact the show has had so far, the Midnight, Texas star said, “You don’t really expect things to hit on such a deep level and for people to react to it. I’m really glad that the conversation kind of shifted from how smutty and sexy and hot it was to how life-changing that can be for people.”

Still, the attention is a lot. “I think I’m going to log off and just take time for myself,” he admitted. “To focus on what I really want to do and the reasons that I do this job for.”

Heated Rivalry can be streamed in full on HBO Max.