Competitive twins have a blast on ‘Ellen’s Game of Games’

Bushkill natives Joe and Sean Leone appeared on NBC’s hilarious prime-time game show, Ellen’s Game of Games in this season’s Twin Show on Sunday, March 7. The 27-year-old brothers advanced to Round Two.

It all started when the pair of engineers, who also aspire to be comedians, met another set of twins who told them about the show at the 2019 Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio.

“It’s the world’s largest gathering of twins in this small Ohio town,” Sean said. “It’s basically a great big party and celebration of twins.”

The Leones submitted an audition with a casting director to hopefully be on the show hosted by the famous Ellen DeGeneres. They then did a live interview in June of 2020 and learned in early August that they had been selected for the show.

“The whole thing was a little bit of positivity during a very strange time with the Covid,” Joe said. “We went into it with the attitude of having fun though we’re both very competitive.”

Their competitiveness stems from playing hard-core tennis and soccer while at East Stroudsburg High School. After that, they hunkered down and focused on academics at the University of Pittsburgh where each earned his engineering degree.

‘Taste Buds’

In early September, they traveled to Los Angeles. Given Covid-19, proper quarantine and precautions were taken by the show.

“The whole experience was breathtaking,” Joe said. “We were in a hotel with the entire Season Four and got to see Ellen and DJ tWitch on the set.”

Round One consisted of a game called Taste Buds.

“They put is in dresses and blindfolded us and then we went back-to-back and link arms,” Sean described.

“One of us had to bend over a random dish while the other of us was basically on his back with the linked arms and taste it,” Joe said. “The taster then had to describe the dish to the other and he had to guess what it was.”

They took turns doing this and victoriously advanced to Round Two.

“In the second round, only one twin competed,” Sean said. “It was trivia, and we decided Joe would compete.”

The game was, indeed, trivia questions, but with a little caveat: if you got the answer wrong, you dropped through a hole into a pit full of something. No contestant knew prior what this something would be.

“The question was ‘who is the director and star of the hit HBO show ‘InSecure,’” Joe said. “I guessed wrong and just didn’t know and was upset with myself.”

The correct answer was Issa Rae. Down Joe went into a massive foam pit.

Before the show, the twins had lived in New York City.

“The weather in LA was just so alluring and with us both wanting to be comedians, California seemed the place to be,” Sean said.

The brothers now live in the City of Angels.

“We were very excited to be chosen for the show,” Joe said. “Our advice to anyone who gets to go on ‘Ellen’s Game of Games’ is to just have fun with it, be a little goofy and have fun.”