From the YouTube page:
Sterling K. Brown is an Emmy, SAG, and Golden Globe Award–winning actor you know from beloved TV and film projects like This Is Us and Black Panther. He's also got a pair of acclaimed films this year—Biosphere, out now on AMC+, and the Cord Jefferson–directed satirical drama, American Fiction, coming in December. But how is he with spicy food? Find out as the veteran thespian takes on the wings of death and discusses on-screen deaths, the G.O.A.T. football movies, and his enduring love of Shakespeare.
The Shakespeare sonnet starts at roughly 21:03.
Think about the crazy-ass network of historical contingencies that stretch from, say the first publication of that sonnet in 1609 to November 30, 2023, when Brown recited that sonnet after having eaten a progressively hotter raft of ten chicken wings with hot sauce. FWIW I was in graduate school in Buffalo in the mid-1970s about a decade after Frank and Teressa’s Anchor Bar got Buffalo-style hot wings started. But it would be a while before they became a national phenomenon.
I suppose we could follow one line of causality that runs from Shakespeare up through whenever Sterling Brown read those sonnets and memorized that one. Then we can follow another line that leads from that moment to Brown being on the Hot Ones podcast. There’s another line of causality the eventuates in the invention of Buffalo Wings in 1964 and then leads to the first Hot Ones podcast, whenever that was back in 2015. These lines of causality meet up when Brown is one the show. Now, was the sonnet recitation planned from the beginning? Did Brown know it was coming? Who knows.
Here's an earlier post about Hot Ones, with clips of Cate Blanchett and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
