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Now it’s not a big deal.” The Hot Ones team back in New York is finding a replacement-these days, there’s a long list of public figures happy to sit for an interview on the show-and he’s already focused on his next guest, rapper Kid Cudi, who wants to talk about his new Netflix animated series. A day-of cancellation, he says as he takes a sip of his margarita, “used to be a crisis. But the subject canceled, so instead he’s sitting across from me at Pizzana in West Hollywood-where, mercifully, there are no wings on the menu-shrugging off the last-minute change of plans. He flew to Los Angeles to interview a major sports star for the latest season of the show, which kicked off September 27. I’m meeting with Evans on one of those rare days off. So I’m surprised when he confides, “Wings are dead to me.

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The show has made him a sort of hot sauce connoisseur, and he now has a kitchen cabinet full of bottles of the stuff. He polishes them off like it’s just a normal Tuesday, even as his guests struggle to keep up with the mounting Scoville scale. In his nearly eight years working on Hot Ones, Evans estimates that he’s eaten more than 2,000 spicy chicken wings on camera. “But I kind of like that we have that, that the only time Maya Rudolph does Hot Ones is when she’s doing fake Hot Ones.” I’m not eating those wings,’” Evans recalls, his voice getting high and sing-songy as he swears. “She was like, ‘Sean I love you but there is no way in fuh-uck that I’m ever doing your show. After filming their Loot scene together, Evans says he invited Rudolph-who has actually spoofed the show twice, having previously played a hot wing-eating Beyoncé in a Saturday Night Live sketch-to appear on a future episode of Hot Ones. It almost sounds sad to say, but by virtue of taking it seriously and working really, really hard, we’ve kind of set ourselves apart from the pack.”īut anyone who sits down for an interview does have to eat the wings-or at least be game to try-which can make it a hard sell for certain people. “They confuse their proximity with celebrity for actual celebrity and they don’t do the actual work. “I saw an opportunity because most interview shows don’t do this level of research,” says Evans. And he can cover a lot of ground during a 10-wing interview, reaching back to a musician’s early career or going deep on an actor’s warm-up methods. The 36-year-old former sports reporter spends days researching his subjects and plotting out the right moment-or, more specifically, the right wing-for every question. Like several of the people I called to ask about Hot Ones, this publicist attributed the success of the show not to the hot wings but to the way Evans conducts thoughtful, in-depth interviews with his guests. But I think it was a little fresher that it wasn’t that.” “In the past, if you were doing that scene in a movie, it would’ve been The Tonight Show. “It’s a testament to the mainstream popularity of that show,” Yang says of the scene going viral. When the show he cameoed on with Rudolph, Loot, began streaming on Apple TV+ over the summer, a clip of the fake interview began to make the rounds online, quickly racking up more than 10 million views. It was a surreal experience even for Evans, who as the everyman host of Hot Ones-where he interviews guests as they eat progressively spicier chicken wings-has watched calmly as a plate of wings made Kevin Hart cry and sent Gordon Ramsay running for the bathroom.

“I was worried I ruined the tape, but then it ended up in the episode.” “I remember I said something to her and she goes, ‘Oh, good one, Sean, did you go to fucking school?’ And I was mad at myself for laughing,” Evans tells me over lunch on a recent Thursday afternoon.

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Did he want to appear in a spoof of his oddball celebrity interview show Hot Ones for a scene in a new comedy series starring Maya Rudolph? His response was an immediate “Hell yeah,” which is how Evans found himself on the Paramount lot trying to keep a straight face as Rudolph, in character as the scorned ex-wife of a tech billionaire, stalked around the set, swearing, chugging beer and yelling insults at him.

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One day a while back, Sean Evans-journalist, host, professional eater of hot wings-got a text message from TV writer Alan Yang.

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