The Wrestling Star Kevin James Said He Fought On Hot Ones

You might describe YouTube's viral show, Hot Ones, as what might happen if Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and Man V. Food fell in love at a sports bar over a big ole pile of insanely-spicy chicken wings. Or, as Jimmy Fallon described it to Selena Gomez on an episode of Late Night, it's a show where celebrities sit down with host, Sean Evans, to talk about their personal lives and professional projects while eating a gauntlet of chicken wings, each doused in a progressively spicier hot sauce chosen by Evans (via YouTube). As Evans says at the beginning of each episode, it's "the show with the hot questions and the even hotter wings."  

Celebrities who have set their mouths afire while fielding Evans' probing questions include Fallon and Gomez, Paul Rudd, Scarlet Johansson, Guy Fieri, Gordon Ramsey, and Kevin James, the star of Netflix's upcoming comedy series, The Crew. James who was Evans' guest du jour on February 11, 2021, made it through the first five wings before he seemed to really notice the heat (via YouTube). By his eighth, which had a Scoville spiciness rating of 135,600 (the highest rating for edible peppers is around 1.4 million), James was mumbling incoherently (something about "frozen dog poop with hot sauce on it" and wanting to punch Evans in the face).

But all along, James kept talking, and that is how we learned this interesting tidbit about the professional wrestling star James once grappled with.

Actor, comedian, and star of the upcoming Netflix comedy series The Crew, Kevin James is often referred to as an "everyman." And sure, you might say Kevin James is just like the rest of us if the rest of us happen to have careers making iconic comedy films like Hitch with stars like Will Smith (via IMDb). But seriously, James does have an"accessible vibe" about him, which may derive from his middle-class upbringing in Long Island, New York, where he went to Ward Melville High School, a public high school in Setauket. As it turns out, James isn't the only celebrity who went there. 

As a guest on YouTube's Hot Ones, James was several wings into his interview with Sean Evans when he began talking about how he'd been recruited to the high school wrestling team specifically to grapple with the now-retired professional wrestler, Mick Foley, who was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013 (via WWE). "I would kind of throw him around a little bit. I think I was in better shape than him back then," James remarked. However, Foley was clearly the one more suited to WWE fame: "I remember him jumping off his roof into like cardboard boxes." He showed the signs of what James called a "demented mind, "but the actor stressed that Foley's "just a great, great guy. But he's definitely a little off."