Melissa McCarthy discusses Plainfield tornado while eating hot wings on “Hot Ones”

As host of the YouTube show “Hot Ones,” Crystal Lake native Sean Evans asks “hot questions” of celebrity guests.

And Evans asks those questions as he and his guests sample wings that grow “progressively hotter throughout the interview,” according to a 2020 Northwest Herald story.

On June 15, the “Hot Ones” guest was actress and Plainfield native Melissa McCarthy.

“How are you around spicy food before we get started?” Evans asked at the beginning of the show.

“Terrible,” McCarthy said. “I have no threshold for spicy at all.”

So while eating hot wings across from each other, McCarthy discussed a number of topics.

She talked about her role as Ursula in 2023 movie “The Little Mermaid.” She discussed how signing up for dramatic acting classes with Michael Harney changed the trajectory of her career and her “closest to the sun experience” as a member of the “Saturday Night Live” Five-Timers Club.

And then McCarthy discussed her firsthand memories of the 1990 Plainfield tornado.

“As he got closer to the top of the stairs, he just turned around and was like, ‘There’s no upstairs. It’s gone.’ ”

—  Melissa McCarthy, actress and Plainfield native, on discussing the 1990 Plainfield tornado on the "Hot Ones" YouTube show

The air was ‘quiet again, like strangely quiet’

It’s not the first time McCarthy shared memories of growing up in the Joliet area.

In a 2014 Herald-News story, McCarthy talked about attending St. Francis Academy (now Joliet Catholic Academy), enjoying high school football games, stopping for a sandwich at the former Sub Diggity on West Jefferson Street in Joliet and “all the crazy things I did with my friends.”

But on June 15, while eating hot wings, McCarthy told Evans her personal experience with the Plainfield tornado.

The day of the tornado, Aug. 28, 1990, was hot and humid, according to a 2015 Herald-News story about the tornado’s 25th anniversary. The storm that afternoon produced large hail, power outages and a tornado with winds up to 310 mph, The Herald-News story said.

That tornado “ripped through much of Plainfield and parts of Crest Hill and Joliet” and killed 29 people – 24 instantly – injured 350, damaged 470 homes and destroyed another 1,000 homes, The Herald-News story said.

McCarthy said on the show that she had come up from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale to Plainfield to see her parents and friends. On the day of the tornado, McCarthy was visiting a friend who lived in a townhouse.

The area had two groups of townhouses and his was the last one. McCarthy said on the show that she and her friend were sitting on a couch in front of a patio window when they felt a change in pressure.

“I just remember him grabbing me, like really roughly, and jerking me by the shirt, and we went toward his basement stairs.”

McCarthy said during the show that she heard a loud noise and felt a weird shift in pressure. A few minutes later, the air was “quiet again, like strangely quiet.”

So McCarthy and her friend left the basement. The window was blown out.

“He’s, like, ‘something’s weird’ and he went upstairs,” McCarthy said, “and as he got closer to the top of the stairs, he just turned around and was, like, ‘There’s no upstairs. It’s gone.’ ”

So McCarthy and her friend walked outside.

“The entire block was gone,” she said.

‘What we wanted was a disruptive element’

Evans, a 2004 Crystal Lake Central graduate, said in a 2020 Northwest Herald story that he and Christopher Schonberger, the editor-in-chief of the digital magazine “First We Feast,” conceived “Hot Ones” in 2015 as a video brand for it.

Because the magazine was produced in the Complex Media building in New York City, the building had a “steady stream of rappers, entertainers and athletes roaming its halls,” the story said.

“There were all these people we had access to, but we didn’t know what we exactly could do with them,” Evans, a writer for Complex, said in the story. “We were forced to come up with an idea and come up with it quick. Christopher was like, ‘What if we had celebrities eat violently hot chicken wings over the course of the interview as a way to break them down?’”

And why not? Humor, McCarthy said in the 2014 Herald-News story, can help people forget their troubles. “I just want them to have a great time, and hopefully, their stomachs will hurt from laughing.”

McCarthy’s mouth certainly “hurt a lot,” she said at the end of her appearance on “Hot Ones.” She said all the hot sauces were “terrible in their own different ways,” but she was smiling as she said it.

She compared the experience to the fun of breaking one’s leg because “now everyone gets to sign my cast.”

But maybe that’s the point.

“We were really an interview show first, then what we wanted was a disruptive element, something to take our celebrity guests and knock them right out of their PR-driven flight pattern,” Evans said in the 2020 story.