Kevin Hart is headed back under the lights, this time as the target. The roast of Kevin Hart will stream live on Netflix on Sunday, May 10, at 8 p.m. ET, and Jeff Ross is calling it revenge for Hart’s turn as roastmaster of the 2024 Tom Brady special.
Ross said he does not want to spoil the surprises, but said there will be plenty of them. He described the event as a comic’s roast, built around Hart being “a comic at the top of the game” who wants friends and people from his life to take shots at him. That framing matters because Ross is not treating this as a standard celebrity pile-on. He is treating it as payback from the same room where Hart once held the mic.
Hart earned that place by steering the roast of Tom Brady, and he did not take it easy on the seven-time Super Bowl winner. Ross said Hart was “really mean” and “really vicious” during the special, and Hart dug into Brady’s divorce from Gisele Bündchen and his strained relationship with Bill Belichick. Brady later said he would not do another roast because of the way it affected his children and the people he cares about most.
That history is why Ross sees Sunday’s show as more than another streaming comedy event. It is also why he said Hart now has agreed to be roasted, with the comic promising the swords are out and that the special will be no holds barred. Hart, for his part, has said the format should involve a conversation beforehand if there is something crazy someone does not want included. Ross’s response suggests there will still be very little protection once the show starts.
The material hanging over Hart is not hard to find. In 2017, he admitted cheating on his then-pregnant wife during a drug-fueled Las Vegas trip, and footage of the affair was later used in an attempted multimillion-dollar extortion against him. Two years later, he stepped down as host of the 91st Oscars after homophobic tweets resurfaced. Those episodes have already followed him through public life, and a live roast gives comedians a chance to turn them into punch lines in real time.
For Hart, the event is a test of whether a comic who can dish it out can also absorb it on his own terms. For Ross, it is the cleanest kind of payback, delivered in front of an audience that knows exactly why the knives are out.
