Sean Evans

Sean Christopher Evans (born April 26, 1986) is an American YouTuber who is best known for co-creating the series Hot Ones, which he has hosted since 2015, in which he interviews celebrities as they eat progressively spicier chicken wings. The series has been nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards. In July 2025, Evans was named in Time magazine's inaugural “TIME100 Creators” list - branded by the publication as the 100 most influential digital voices.

Education and early career Sean Evans was born in the Chicago suburb of Evanston to Michael Evans and Donna Arthofer. He has a brother named Gavin. Evans is a 2004 graduate of Crystal Lake Central High School, where he played football and baseball. He graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcast journalism, where a professor suggested he become a weatherman. He grew up looking up to the interviewing prowess of Howard Stern, Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman, and Adam Carolla. One of his earliest memories, he says, is his father taping Letterman during the week and binge-watching them all on a Saturday.

Before working as an interviewer, Evans was a copywriter for the Chicago tourism board. During that time, he freelanced for Complex Magazine, doing on-screen interviews with celebrities such as 2 Chainz and Steph Curry in New Orleans. Complex liked his interviews and offered him a full-time job, so he quit his copywriting job and moved to New York a month later. Hot Ones tagline is, "It's the show with hot questions, and even hotter wings", and Evans repeats it in the intro to each episode. New episodes normally come out Thursdays at 11 a.m. ET. Evans has said, "Celebrity is so unobtainable by definition, you know. But what's more common man than dying on hot sauce?"

The format of the show, which regularly amasses millions of views per episode on YouTube, involves Evans and his guest eating 10 chicken wings, or vegan substitutes, each doused in a different hot sauce that is spicier than the one before it. Evans' episode, in 2019, with Paul Rudd spawned the meme, "Look at us. Who would have thought? Not me."

Other videos for First We Feast include teaming up with Chili Klaus, another spicy food internet personality, to eat a Carolina Reaper pepper, a record-breaking chili pepper (1,569,300 Scovilles) grown by chili pepper guru Smokin' Ed Currie.

In 2021, Mikey Day impersonated Evans in a Saturday Night Live sketch where Maya Rudolph plays Beyoncé in a spoof episode of Hot Ones and ends up having a meltdown due to not being able to handle the spiciness. A year later, in June 2022, Evans did a cameo as himself in an episode of Apple TV+ show Loot, where the main character, also played by Rudolph, does the Hot Ones interview and ends up having a meltdown due to not being able to handle the spiciness.

On May 25, 2021, Evans was nominated for the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host at the 48th Daytime Emmy Awards. He has won internet entertainment awards including the Shorty, the Lovie, and the Webby.