Sean Evans
Daytime Emmy® Award-nominated talk show host and Illinois alumnus Sean Evans will serve as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Commencement speaker on Saturday, May 16, at 9:30 a.m. in Gies Memorial Stadium. Evans graduated from Illinois with a degree in broadcast journalism in 2008.
Evans is the co-creator and host of the popular YouTube show “Hot Ones,” where musicians, professional athletes and television and movie stars join Evans in eating chicken wings doused in progressively spicier hot sauces within the format of a talk-show interview. He notched a Daytime Emmy® Award nomination in 2021 for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host and has won multiple internet entertainment awards. Evans also was named to Time magazine’s inaugural “Time100 Creators” list last year, heralding the most influential digital voices of the modern media industry.
“Sean Evans defined his own path and reimagined the role of a journalist and a talk show host in the modern media landscape,” said Illinois Chancellor Charles L. Isbell, Jr. “We encourage Illinois students and alumni to be innovative, and Sean created something no one else had. His work inspires us to continue to push boundaries, to challenge convention and to develop new ideas instead of just adopting old ones.”
Evans forged an affinity for the university long before he arrived at Illinois as an undergraduate student. His mother attended the U. of I., and Evans’ favorite holiday haul to this day was the morning he found a Sega Genesis and an orange-and-blue Illinois Starter jacket underneath his Christmas tree as a boy.
Once he stepped on campus as a student, a lasting imprint was left almost immediately.
“You walk out on the Quad, and it looks so quintessentially college,” said Evans, a native of Crystal Lake. “It looks like a college out of a film. There’s a scale and a history to it that really smacks you in the face. Walking onto the Main Quad for the first time, I had this feeling of being in a totally different place in my life and feeling a lot of comfort in it.”
Evans said he “trusted the incubation period” of the journalism program in the College of Media to build up his skill set. He recalled the high standards the professors expected out of students, and the meaningful experience he gained cycling through each production role on WPGU-FM student news broadcasts.
“Sean’s career is a wonderful illustration of where an Illinois education, one that nourishes creativity and confidence, can take you. We are so proud of his accomplishments and know that he will inspire students with his story,” said Tracy Sulkin, dean of the College of Media.
But like many young people entering the workforce in 2008, he found a flagging job market upon graduation. Evans returned to his old summer gig: a Chicago architecture tour guide.
“I remember feeling so hopeless,” Evans said. “There was this existential feeling to it. But even at that time, I had a passion for what I wanted to do. I would take every freelance project I could get. I knew I had a passion for this work and needed an outlet for it.”
His meteoric rise began after successfully pitching and developing “Hot Ones” in 2015, when he was working at Complex magazine. He wasn’t even the biggest fan of chicken wings. At best, Evans thought it could be a fun idea he and his co-creators would program on a quarterly basis. But the format of humanizing celebrities — and making them forget their media training — by putting them through blistering hot wing sauces worked in capitalizing on the attention economy. Notable guests have included Will Smith, Stephen Curry, Billie Eilish, Justin Timberlake, Gordon Ramsay, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dua Lipa and many more across the show’s 400 episodes.
“I certainly never thought it would be my own media company,” Evans said. “We were working in cubicles at Complex and ended up making something that became bigger than these giant, hulking media companies it was incubated in.”
Evans remains deeply involved in the preparation for each “Hot Ones” episode and works late into the night formulating precise questions and perfecting his delivery of those queries to his guests. These nocturnal work sessions always transport Evans back to his time at Illinois, where he would sign up for the latest availability in the basement of Gregory Hall to edit his broadcast journalism projects.
“I always really liked going down there, having my headphones on, being the only person in the building and just lost in the basement of Gregory Hall cutting packages,” Evans said. “I still to this day work like that. I’ve written my best interview questions — and probably the most interview questions — after 10 p.m.”
As his own celebrity stature has grown, Evans has eagerly returned to his alma mater. He has attended sporting events, spoken to students and even hosted a special edition of “Hot Ones” with Illinois men’s head basketball coach Brad Underwood as the guest. It’s all a part of giving back to a place that has been special to him for most of his life, and Evans can’t wait to add to that legacy with his role as Commencement speaker.
“As somebody who loves this school, went to this school and now has this crazy pop culture platform, it’s fun to bring that energy back to Illinois,” Evans said.
For more information regarding the universitywide ceremony — including the stadium’s clear-bag policy, student regalia and parking instructions — visit commencement.illinois.edu.
