Let’s say you’re a young, wide-eyed skier hanging around Aspen’s Buttermilk Mountain with friends when a shit-talking 80-something in jeans with the ski style of a hungover cowboy pulls up to the halfpipe deck, growls something along the lines of watch this, punk, and proceeds to throw a 1620. There are wows, disbelief and WTFs aplenty between you and your buds before the inevitable reality-check descends. Hey, wait a minute—what’s going on here?
Such is the innocent punking envisioned by superpipe wunderkind Alex Ferreira and friend Kyler Sciarrone when they created “Hotdog Hans”—i.e., Alex made up as a cantankerous, hard-done-by former freestyle boss with an ever-evolving backstory rife with Olympic ignominy, foul language, drinking, womanizing, a scofflaw son and plenty of police-cruiser backseats. You know, a man who seems compelled to say and do almost everything in the now-mostly-unacceptable old way—much like many greying Whistlerites.
Little did the pair suspect their resulting 2022 film, Hotdog Hans, would evolve into a viral YouTube series, today with five numbered episodes built around ski plots and a pair of comical intermezzos involving pickleball and golf. Propelled by the perpetual human need for an irascible hero—and how well Ferreira pulls it off—the series is a global hit. “Hans has more fans than I do,” says Ferreira, who thinks the character strikes a chord of hope around ski country. “It was easier to be a ski bum back in the day, so I look at Hans and think, good—that still exists, and hope it resonates with people.”
Certainly, when Hans appears on the hill he’s a celebrity loved by everyone—kids, parents, grandparents. Meaning that to know Hans doesn’t require knowing who’s behind the character, even if it’s a multi X Games gold- and Olympic silver-and-bronze-medallist who just came off the most dominant season in men’s halfpipe history, going five-for-five in the 2023-24 World Cup and adding X Games and Dew Tour titles for a total of seven straight victories (Ferreira has also already won the first event of this current season, the Copper Mountain Grand Prix on Dec. 22, 2024).
But while Hotdog Hans may be a standout example of the disguise-prank subgenre (à la Kyrie Irving’s Uncle Drew), it’s the sharp writing, smart production and marketing savvy that give it life. From impeccable makeup and prosthetic work to the Morgan Freeman parody narration; from Hans’ perfect ’70s jeans to an old Columbia jacket (Ferreira’s clothing sponsor) scoured from the internet; and from the gravelly New England accent inspired by Ferreira’s own unfiltered grandfather to guest appearances by the likes of Jonny Moseley and Lance Armstrong. There’s also Hans’ ski style—flailing arms and ragged, pistoning turns, moves that Ferreira says came naturally. “Maybe it was from growing up with old Warren Miller movies and thinking that’s what skiing was like in the ’60s,” he ponders.
The entire enterprise is highly professional, from idea sessions in the studio to filming and post-production. “My business partner [writer/director] Matt Hobbs is one-of-a-kind when it comes to packaging and marketing, and it’s an honour to create these pieces with him,” says Ferreira, who’d just returned from filming Hotdog Hans 5 in Switzerland when I talked to him last April.
The series took a quantum leap with Hotdog Hans 3, on which Aspen resident Ben Silverman, an award-winning producer behind comedies like The Office and Jane the Virgin, acted as advisor. “It was truly funny and inventive and my kind of angular comedy,” he says, after his son showed him the first film. “Having made a ton of character-driven comedy, you know when something works and actually makes you laugh.”
He also appreciated Hans’ edginess. “I love how dangerous and third-rail some of Hans’ language and attitude is,” he says. “So hyper-juxtaposed to Alex’s wholesome-life-at-home-with-mom-give-back-to-the-community personality.”
Meaning that if Alex was actually anything like Hans it wouldn’t work. “And if the writing and performance wasn’t so raw and strongly comedic it wouldn’t work either,” Silverman assesses, giving due to Ferreira’s preternaturally strong acting, which is both convincing and consistent. According to Hobbs, once Alex transforms into Hans he never breaks character—he’s in there. “That’s exactly how I feel,” says Ferreira. “Once I’m in, there’s no coming out. It happens very naturally for me.” (Check out @Hotdoghans on IG for a little taste).
As a testament to Ferreira’s ability to bring it, his immortal bad-boy avatar may, in fact, be too convincing. “Weirdly, that’s how many people see me now,” he chuckles. “As a ruffly old guy who messes with people. They might be talking to Alex but they treat me like Hans.”
The conflation could be due to an undeniable synergy between the characters, who share an ethos of dusting themselves off after a beat-down to get back at it and find redemption, a wellspring of underdog motivation that bubbles to the surface at every opportunity. Certainly a lot of his people encouraged Ferreira to stop skiing after two hard crashes forced him to withdraw from the 2023 X Games, but “man am I glad I didn’t listen,” he said after taking gold for the third time in the 2024 event. And that line sounds an awful lot like the postscript narration to Hotdog Hans 3, in which Alex actually battles his geriatric alter ego—“No matter how far down they say you are, it’s never too far to come back.”
Leslie Anthony is a Whistler-based author, editor, biologist and bon vivant who has never met a mountain he didn’t like.
