The Traitors Season 3 is here, and as if I couldn’t wait already for the social deception reality series to spice up the 2025 TV schedule, the fabulous Alan Cumming just offered up another reason to get excited to tune into the series again. The host explained how he decided upon this season’s traitors at the roundtable, and it’s hilariously diabolical.
As I get ready to stream The Traitors premiere, I’m obsessed with what Alan Cumming had to say about the moment the cast was blindfolded for this season’s traitors to be chosen. As the Scottish actor revealed about the process:
It’s actually one of these moments in the show where I’m terrified. It’s terrifying in case I fuck up, but also it’s such fun… They have those blindfolds on for a long time, like 40 minutes or something. And I go around, around, around. First of all, we film them all. I touched them all so that’s on camera, so we’ve got it clean for everybody to have been touched just in case. And then I start, you know, stopping…
When speaking to Entertainment Weekly about choosing the traitors, Cumming said that the cast actually sits there for just under an hour while he makes tons of slow laps around the roundtable and attempts to throw off each of them as they listen in for clues about who he taps on the shoulder. When asked whether he accounts for sounds of brushes of fabric when walking around, he said this as well:
We do it on purpose! You see me doing stuff that you didn’t before, doing the clever checks of just [ruffling my sleeve fabric] and stopping ever so slightly and pausing and squeaks on the floor and stuff. You know, when you’re blindfolded, your hearing becomes much more diligent and refined, and so everyone’s listening so intently, and so I have to be even more naughty and like an old trickster than ever. I love when I hear them say ‘Heard him stop! I heard him stop!’
Alan Cumming is coming off the exciting high of the series winning two Emmys for Outstanding Reality Competition Program and Outstanding Host, along with a double season renewal. I love that Cumming takes his sweet time to pick a traitor – it must add some tension to the scene we can feel. He also apparently caught on to how much the contestants are paying attention to sounds and such during the choosing process and really playing into it.
While hinting at the new season, he shared his “favorite bit” about picking the traitors this time around was one of the contestants started acting “like a weird owl” and was “staring at everybody” because the person was just so hungry for information. I can’t wait to see who he’s talking about.
The third season of The Traitors has a ton of celebrity contestants that we’re excited about, like Bob the Drag Queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race, Big Brother’s Danielle Reyes, Zac Efron’s brother Dylan from Down To Earth and retired WWE wrestler Nikki Garcia. The first three episodes of The Traitors are now available to stream with a Peacock subscription, with new episodes every Thursday.