The Untold Truth Of Sean Evans From Hot Ones

Before he was everyone's favorite interview host, Sean Evans majored in broadcast journalism at the University of Illinois, where a professor suggested he become a weatherman. As Evans told Business Insider, "That's kind of where my focus was, but then you graduate, you get a job at an agency or somewhere writing press releases." He then went on to work as a copywriter while freelancing for Complex.

Complex sent him down to New Orleans for some print interview pieces, and since they were transitioning to video, asked to put Evans on screen. As Evans wrote in a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread, "I remember studying note cards and being nervous as hell for, like, a five minute video interview with 2 Chainz." But it paid off, because Complex liked his interviews and offered him a full time job. He quit his copywriting job and moved to New York a month later.

At Complex, he connected with Chris Schonberger, Editor in Chief at First We Feast, the new Complex YouTube channel. As Evans told The Verge, Schonberger pitched him the idea of a celebrity interview show featuring "violently hot chicken wings." Evans was for it, and the rest is internet history.

Growing up, Sean Evans would binge watch David Letterman with his father every Saturday. Evans would even make his dad pause every time the audience laughed, just so he could explain the joke. As Evans told the Los Angeles Times, "In a weird way this [Hot Ones] was probably all created because I just want to make my dad laugh the way Letterman made him laugh." Evans even wrote about David Letterman for his college application to the University of Illinois, where he studied broadcast journalism. To this day, he often defines the success of his show as something that kids can watch with their parents (via The Hollywood Reporter).

In addition to sculpting Evan's sense of humor and interview style, his dad also inadvertently trained him for a life of spicy eating. Growing up in Illinois, whenever there was a Chicago Bears game, Evans' father would serve "hot-ass salsa" (via Reddit AMA). Evans would ask his dad for mild salsa, and his dad would reject his plea. Over time this helped Evans build up his tolerance for spice, and when he met Chris Schonberger, this appreciation extended to hot sauces and hot wings.

Sean Evans shocked the world when he ate a taco, not from one side to the other like a normal person, but from the top, right down the center. This crime against tacos took place during a YouTube video with fast food reviewer Daym Drops, where the two test out spicy fast food menu items. The victim was the Taco Bell Fiery Doritos Locos Taco. His fans and the media have since referred to the incident as "tacogate."

Apparently Evans has always eaten tacos this way. He'll eat down from the top until there's just a tube of ground meat, then he'll turn the tube around and eat it from one end to the other. As Evans explained on the H3 Podcast, "I like that meat tube at the end, and I don't really care about the lettuce and the cheese or whatever's floating up on top of that." Evans also argues that it's a cleaner way to eat a taco, without spilling the contents all over yourself. Looks like Sean Evans will defend his taco eating style to the grave.

Behind the spice-induced swearing and sweating on Hot Ones, the real meat on the bone is the show's fantastic interview. Evans has consistently stunned guests with intelligent, original questions. Steven Colbert himself complimented Sean on his interview skills. As Evans told Canada.com, "We're putting our guests in an extremely vulnerable situation" by forcing them to eat incredibly spicy wings, so the least they can do it nail the interview questions.

While Evans does a large part of the research himself, it's actually a team effort (although a small team) between him, show creator Chris Schonberger, and Evans' little brother Gavin, who lives in Chicago. As reported by The Verge, Gavin starts the race off. He'll compile everything he can find on the interview subject and make a Wikipedia-like document for Schonberger and Evans. These documents can be as long as 30 pages.

Then the baton passes to Schonberger and the elder Evans. Evans will take the podcasts, profiles, and videos, while Schonberger takes the rest. They then reconvene right before the show and try to narrow the interview topics down to just 10 (via The Hollywood Reporter). It's hours of off-camera work, but the result is one of the best interview shows around.

When Hot Ones first became popular, it fell under scrutiny for the lack of female guests. Some scholars went as far to argue that the show was damaging to women. Emily Contois, a professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa, wrote that Hot Ones reinforced the gender norm of eating hot wings as masculine. In addition to the lack of women, she argued the show limits its female guests to those with a "cool girl" persona.

However, Katherine Timpf counters in The National Review that this is "about as absurd as it gets," since eating chicken wings is no longer the gendered activity Contois suggests. But Timpf does question why Hot Ones doesn't have more female guests. Evans himself is concerned about this and wrote in his 2017 Reddit AMA, "We haven't done a good enough job of booking women. In our experience, it's just been a tougher sell but it's something we think about/discuss all the time."

And it looks like the team is trying. At the end of season six, Evans urged his fans to list at least five women they wanted to see on the show. 

One way Hot Ones chooses its guests is by working through a particular subculture, such as the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) superstars. Although sometimes dismissed as silly or fake by the general public, wrestling fans take the sport seriously and are over the moon to see their favorite wrestlers outside of Raw and Smackdown.

Sean Evans has supported the wrestling community by not only including A-list roster members such as Chris Jericho, Sasha Banks, and Stone Cold Steve Austin, but by asking the kind of in-depth and intelligent questions that only a fan of the genre would think to ask, such as the origins of their gimmicks or the different companies they have worked under.

Even outside of Hot Ones, Evans drops hints of a deeper understanding of the professional wrestling subculture, mentioning in an interview with Business Insider that "there has to be a part of you, that Vince McMahon thing where you know what the people want more than the people know what they want" when talking about selecting guests. (Vince McMahon is the CEO of WWE and has a complicated love/hate relationship with the fans.) Maybe his entertainment know-hows came from watching wrestling growing up!

Although his job is to interview celebrities, Sean Evans has found quite a following of his own. This has led to various Evans-inspired products, as well as some interesting fan art. Of course, there are the Hot Ones hot sauces, available on Heatonist. There's the Hot Ones "The Classic" sauce, which is the perfect accompaniment to pizza or fried chicken, and then there's the "The Last Dab XXX," made with the infamous Pepper X. 

Evans also teamed up with The Doughnut Project to create a Hot Ones doughnut for National Chicken Wing Day in 2017. This sweet and savory dessert included a hot sauce-infused frosting, fried chicken skins, and blue cheese crumble, and was only available for one day

As for the fan art, that's where things get interesting. There are portraits of Evans in the thralls of spice pain, or eerily realistic depictions of him sitting on top of a giant fried chicken burger. There's even a Bojack Horseman-inspired piece featuring "Prawn Evans." The weirdest, however, has to go to the Sean Evans Prayer Candle, available at Illuminidol.