One day a while back, Sean Evans—journalist, host, professional eater of hot wings—got a text message from TV writer Alan Yang. 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. “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. “I was worried I ruined the tape, but then it ended up in the episode.”
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. It was also comedic gold. 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’s a testament to the mainstream popularity of that show,” Yang says of the scene going viral. “In the past, if you were doing that scene in a movie, it would’ve been The Tonight Show. But I think it was a little fresher that it wasn’t that.”
Evans might not be a household name like Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel but Hot Ones is the closest thing the internet has to a late-night talk show. What started as a scrappy web series with a crazy premise has become one of the most popular celebrity interview shows around—let alone on YouTube, where new episodes regularly amass millions of views. Over 19 seasons, everyone from Oscar winner Viola Davis to former professional wrestler Steve Austin to musician Billie Eilish has stopped by to burn their mouths on spicy wings while promoting new projects. It has even inspired its own line of frozen chicken bites and several menu items at Shake Shack. “There’s not a lot like it, especially that lives online,” says a celebrity publicist who has booked multiple clients on the show (and has had many more ask how they can score an invite). “Many have tried, they’re the ones that have broken through.”
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. 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. 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. “I saw an opportunity because most interview shows don’t do this level of research,” says Evans. “They confuse their proximity with celebrity for actual celebrity and they don’t do the actual work. 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.”
But 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. 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. “She was like, ‘Sean I love you but there is no way in fuh-uck that I’m ever doing your show. I’m not eating those wings,’” Evans recalls, his voice getting high and sing-songy as he swears. “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.”
In his nearly eight years working on Hot Ones, Evans estimates that he’s eaten more than 2,000 spicy chicken wings on camera. He polishes them off like it’s just a normal Tuesday, even as his guests struggle to keep up with the mounting Scoville scale. The show has made him a sort of hot sauce connoisseur, and he now has a kitchen cabinet full of bottles of the stuff. So I’m surprised when he confides, “Wings are dead to me. I do not eat wings off the clock.”
I’m meeting with Evans on one of those rare days off. He flew to Los Angeles to interview a major sports star for the latest season of the show, which kicked off September 27. 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. A day-of cancellation, he says as he takes a sip of his margarita, “used to be a crisis. 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.
Things were different during the early days of Hot Ones. The show was cooked up in 2015 as Complex Magazine’s answer to the pivot-to-video trend that swept the publishing world following the rise of YouTube. The staff at the publisher’s food vertical, First We Feast, were brainstorming ideas for new video formats when general manager Chris Schonberger suggested interviewing subjects over hot wings. “I just thought it was funny,” says Schonberger. “Then we kind of saw this magic happen in the room.” The magic, it turns out, was the hot sauce, which broke down guests’ inhibitions and forced them to set aside their talking points.