Marc-André Grondin hosts Hot Ones Québec
Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through our links on this page.
Like most Montrealers, Marc-André Grondin was surprised Wednesday when he heard that Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante would not be seeking re-election.
But the blockbuster news had a particular resonance for Grondin. That’s because the brand-new Québécois talk show he’s hosting, Hot Ones Québec, an adaptation of the ultra-popular American YouTube series Hot Ones, includes an episode with a feature interview with Plante. The first two episodes of the show premiered Wednesday on illico+, Vidéotron’s video-on-demand service, its Netflix-like platform, and the second episode is the one starring Plante. It hit the small screen the same day she announced her imminent departure.
The show, like the American original, is built around the high-concept concept that the guest shows up to sample a wide array of spicy sauces on chicken wings, going from mild to ultra-hot, while being interviewed.
“We didn’t know, obviously,” Grondin said in an interview in a café in Rosemont Thursday. “I was coming out of an interview, I was doing (TVA morning show) Salut Bonjour, and I just turned my phone back on and I was like, ‘Holy shit, what a gift!’”
The interview, taped this year, really shows a different side of Plante, with the mayor looking more relaxed than usual talking about personal matters, like her relationship with her mother, her roots in Rouyn-Noranda where she grew up, and how as a kid she loved coming to Montreal with her father.
At one point, Grondin, probably best-known to the anglo audience for playing the lead role in the critically acclaimed hit Quebec film C.R.A.Z.Y., asks Plante what she thinks she’ll do after her stint as mayor of Montreal. With everyone this week wondering exactly what she plans to do now that she’s leaving the job in November 2025, it’s quite a coup to have her talking about exactly that on the show.
Here’s what she told Grondin: “Whatever I end up doing I want to feel, as lofty as it sounds, that I am continuing to change the world. When I was doing community work, I was working a lot with Indigenous communities or with the homeless.”
At this point, having just ingested some might hot wings, she shouts — “My mouth is on fire!!!”
Then she continues to mull about her future.
“So I think my next challenge will be in that line of work. But culture is a big part of me too. Honestly though I have a lot more work to do as mayor. I said I would be running again. So I’ll have another mandate. So I don’t have anything more to say.”
And again she steps up the volume, saying: “I’m ready for another campaign. I ate La Bombe!”
La Bombe is one of the spiciest spice sauces the guests try out on their chicken wings and much of the fun of the show is watching how the guests react to the sauces. Plante looks to be finding them pretty challenging, while, at least in the first episodes, Grondin appears to be eating the spicy wings without feeling much pain.
The first episode features actor Pierre-Luc Funk, a good friend of Grondin’s. Other guests on the 12 shows include actor/comic Stéphane Rousseau, comic Boucar Diouf, TV host Christian Bégin, comic Rosalie Vaillancourt, director Xavier Dolan, actor Patrice Robitaille and comic Katherine Levac.
Grondin, who also now works as a TV producer, had tried to do an online version of Hot Ones here six years ago, but couldn’t get it off the ground. Then the production company Fair-Play asked him to host the show and he quickly accepted, even though he’d never hosted a TV show before.
What he likes is that thanks to the spicy chicken wings, he believes you can do more interesting interviews.
“I’ve been trying to go through all the interviews (the guests) have done before and see what the subjects are that are coming back all the time and try to avoid those,” Grondin said. “Trying to ask them questions they’re not asked normally or just take a different angle on certain subjects and it makes it interesting. I’m not more brilliant than anyone else, but because we have the wings, we can do something else. I can ask those questions because the spices are doing the job for me.”
But he has no plans to pursue the career of being a talk-show host, saying he’s an actor and producer first and foremost.
“I’m not going to end up behind a desk for a late-night talk show,” Grondin said.
He’s been in a slew of TV shows and films since C.R.A.Z.Y., but he is the first to admit he wouldn’t be where he is today if it wasn’t for Jean-Marc Vallée, the director of C.R.A.Z.Y., who died in 2021.
“I wouldn’t have had the career I had without him,” Grondin said. “He gave me an international career.”