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.

“I love when a guest comes in and has no idea what they’re in for,” says Evans, who had grown tired of going to press junkets where talent shuffled from room to room answering the same five questions about their upcoming project for every reporter. The staff of Hot Ones actually has a name for when interview subjects loosen up and let down their guard. They call it the Charlize Theron, after Evans’ interview with the actor tied to her 2018 film Gringo, during which Evans recalls watching her visibly relax after her second or third wing. “I saw her shoulders drop and she was just engaged, she was having a good time,” he says. “I could see that it was likely such a departure from everything else that she’d done throughout that media day.”

The Hot Ones premise was wacky (and intimidating) enough that it took some convincing to book A-listers like Theron during the show’s first few seasons. Early episodes featured a smattering of rappers and professional athletes, but the show needed hotter names, pardon the pun, if they wanted it to truly blow up. Over time, that started to happen. In season two, Hot Ones booked Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, whose appearance is still one of the show’s most-viewed episodes. Then T-Pain came on and revealed that he was a fan. That season’s finale featured James Franco and Bryan Cranston, who were promoting the movie Why Him?

But even as the caliber of guests grew, Evans still felt as if they were fighting an uphill battle. “There’s a scene in Private Parts, the Howard Stern movie, that opens up and he’s at the MTV Awards and he comes down as Fart Man. He’s in assless chaps and he blows a fart and it blows up the podium and the crowd goes wild. The audience loves it. And then he goes backstage and everyone who’s in the industry—all these musicians and actors—they look at him like he’s a freak. That’s what it honestly felt like doing Hot Ones in the early days,” Evans explains in between bites of fennel sausage and red onion pizza. “I knew the show could rile up an audience, but in the industry, we were still looked at like a freak show. It was about just overcoming that.”

Somewhere along the way, Hot Ones did overcome that by earning a reputation as one of the few places—outside of maybe a podcast appearance or magazine profile—where talent could crack a proverbial beer, have an in-depth conversation, and show that they were human. And maybe they could even have a little fun, too. The show’s growing audience also helped it get taken more seriously. First We Feast’s YouTube channel now has 11.8 million subscribers who have come to anticipate Hot Ones’ Thursday episode drops. While that’s a smaller audience than network late-night shows, Evans says that Hot Ones fans are “consistent and committed” in a way that is rare in this fragmented media landscape.

Now, actors like Matt Damon and Paul Rudd ask to go on Hot Ones to impress their kids. Others, like Cate Blanchett, might sit for an interview to spread awareness about a project with a younger cohort. Davis, meanwhile, was clearly there for the wings when she appeared on the show recently during promo for The Woman King. ”I need to pace myself, but this is so good,” she moaned in between bites, later telling Evans, “I’m just gonna suck it off the bone.”

Evans never could have imagined he’d build a career on YouTube. Even more unthinkable is that that career would involve eating hot wings with celebrities. A fan of Stern, Kimmel and Adam Carolla, he studied broadcast journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the hope of becoming a sportscaster. He was freelancing in Chicago and working part-time for the city’s tourism board, when he landed a gig covering the NBA All-Star Game that led to a full-time job at Complex. It was there, while he was working out of a cubicle and making $55,000 a year, that the opportunity to host Hot Ones landed in his lap. “I just loved and believed in the idea so much,” he says.

But Evans didn’t exactly realize what he was signing his body up for. Watching him on Hot Ones, it’s clear that he’s become a master of the art of spicy food eating. He barely breaks a sweat, powering through his questions while his guests cough and sputter their way through the half-hour interview. “My tolerance has gotten better, but the most important thing is that I know what to expect,” Evans says. “I think it’s kind of important for me to put up a calm, comforting front. I want to let them know that it’s gonna be okay and we’re gonna make it through this whole thing.”

It’s rare for Evans to trip up, but it can happen. Take the opening episode of the show’s most recent season. Evans is interviewing David Blaine and clearly having a tough time with some of the sauces while the magician gobbles up wing after wing. Ever the professional, Evans pushes through his own discomfort to veer off script, asking Blaine if the years he’s spent training his mind to withstand crazy stunts helped him take on the Hot Ones gauntlet. “I think I just mentally prepare myself for something like that,” Blaine says, laughing as Evans reaches for a glass of milk before asking his next question.

It’s the first episode of a new season when Evans is most vulnerable. The hot sauce lineup changes each season— Schonberger curates a new collection of sauces alongside Noah Chaimberg, owner of Williamsburg hot sauce shop Heatonist—and Evans typically doesn’t taste test before filming begins. His preparation for the interviews is much more involved than his preparation for the wings themselves. He eats a little—usually a bagel or a banana, so his stomach isn’t completely empty—and he has Tums at the ready, but that’s about it. It’s the post-shoot moments that he’s come to ritualize. “Everyone knows that I can’t be bothered at the end of a Hot Ones shoot,” he says. “It’s a nice moment where I put on basketball shorts, crank the AC and watch college basketball and chill out. I think I’ve trained myself like a dog because there’s always that reward at the end. It’s my favorite moment of the week.”

Hot Ones hasn’t exactly made Evans famous, but it has made him famous-adjacent. Before our interview, he ran into Shawn Mendes, who appeared on the show in 2018, at the gym. His connection to Loot co-creator Yang developed after they attended a dinner with Hasan Minhaj and David Chang, who’ve also both been on Hot Ones. When I ask what his ambitions are for himself and the show, he says, “We’re a shooting star in the constellation of pop culture right now. We can get people that an audience is interested in and that keeps the cache of the show at the level that we can continue, but if that fell off and I was interviewing ensemble cast members from the new MTV Teen Mom to like 60,000 views, that would be a living hell. I never want it to get to that kind of a point, but there’s nothing that I’d rather be doing than what I’m doing.”

As Evans polishes off his pizza, he tells me that he’s off to catch a flight to Chicago, where he has been invited to speak in front of the high school students at his alma mater. It’s a nice full-circle moment for him, but he’s a little worried that the TikTok generation won’t be all that impressed by the host of a nearly decade-old YouTube show. Forget coming for late-night, it’s staying relevant with the next generation that's his biggest challenge. But no surprise, they’re Hot Ones fans too. In a video he later posts to Instagram, they give him thunderous applause.