Travis Kelce can be seen on TVs across America just about every weekend through football season. But his newest gig has him on the small screen in a whole new way as he swaps his jersey for a suit to host “Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?”
The show puts a spin on the oft-revived quiz game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”, which sees contestants answer questions specific to a school subject and grade with the help of a class of students.
But now, instead of elementary schoolers, that panel is full of celebrities.
Some of the star panelists viewers will see on the show, which premieres on Prime Video with three episodes Oct. 16, include Nicole Byer, Nikki Glaser, Lala Kent, former NFL star “Ochocinco” Johnson and more.
Kelce has a dream guest on the show though — and it hits a little closer to home.
“I would love to get somebody in my family up there,” he tells TODAY.com. “Either my dad or my brother, because it can get a little embarrassing if you don’t know, like, the simplest of questions.”
Not wanting to put his mom, Donna Kelce — a pop culture figure in her own right as a new Hallmark star and one of Glamour’s Mothers of the Year — in that hot seat, Kelce says dad Ed Kelce and brother Jason Kelce can handle it.
“I think my dad would do pretty good. Jason …” Travis Kelce starts, before taking a big inhale to think. “He’s got some pretty good trivia knowledge, so I think he’d fare pretty good as well.”
Kelce says he would prepare for filming backstage by reading through all the questions and quizzing himself in the process. As he answered them, he “felt pretty confident,” he says.
“I don’t know if I’m making it all the way to $100,000,” he says with a laugh, referring to the largest prize contestants can win if they successfully answer a sixth-grade level question.
“I want to say I could probably make it to fourth or fifth grade,” he adds. “I can make it through … I can give a good run at it.”
Contestants on the original show can at times choose to leave the game, taking some of their winnings with them and giving up any attempts to answer more questions.
But Kelce notes he wouldn’t take that option.
“I know that I would definitely not go home with money — I wouldn’t just leave,” he says.
As host, Kelce essentially plays himself, riffing with contestants over their answers and their trust in the celebs they can “cheat” off of at various points in the game.
He credits the team at Amazon with making him feel “comfortable from the jump.”
“We ran through the show so many times to where I started to really grasp it and make it my own,” he says.
The hosting job is Kelce’s latest gig to help make his onscreen ambitions a reality. Just a few weeks before the “Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?” premiere, Kelce made in his debut in FX’s “Grotesquerie,” alongside Niecy Nash-Betts.
Hosting specifically “felt pretty natural,” Kelce says.
“We had so many unbelievable guests and celebrities, familiar faces, however you want to call them — it was just so genuine and so much fun to be a part of,” he says. “Everybody was just so fun to work with that it didn’t really feel like work.”
His favorite memory from working on set, though, doubled as his most embarrassing.
“I was being silly with one of my friends backstage and trying to act like I was kicking them, like I was Bruce Lee, and I ripped the entire inseam on my suit pants, and it took, like, 15 minutes for somebody to come in and sew that back together for me,” he says. “So that was a really embarrassing moment, and I wasted some time, some valuable time, doing it.”
