This 'Traitors' Faithful Learns the Secrets
I chat with Alan Cumming, EP Sam Rees-Jones and more of the reality series' talent about the jaw-dropping plot twists
As we all know, this month’s biggest Emmy event was of course the live recording of the Prestige Junkie podcast last week, where I was joined by Fargo creator Noah Hawley and stars Juno Temple and Lamorne Morris, all of them Emmy nominees. (If you’re not subscribed, do so now so you don’t miss it.)
But sure, there are some other events going on in the Los Angeles area this week, with Emmy voting set to begin on Thursday. On Sunday HBO went all out with an “experience” featuring the casts of many of their shows, food trucks and the bragging rights of having Albert Brooks and Conan O’Brien share a stage.
Tomorrow RuPaul will be DJing at a roller rink party celebrating Drag Race, and elsewhere in town there will be a piano bar singalong with the nominated songwriters for Only Murders in the Building. On Thursday, 33 businesses across Los Angeles will be celebrating “All Out for Fallout Day” — but none of them are located in the Westfield Century City mall, which is hosting an experience for fellow best drama series contender The Crown.
The final round of Emmy voting is always an odd time to build enthusiasm, with the luckiest of Hollywood on vacation somewhere fabulous (including plenty of the nominated talent) and the shows in question many months, if not a full year, old. If you voted to nominate The Bear or Hacks in a bunch of categories, you’re probably going to vote for them to win, too. In many cases the likeliest winners feel baked in (though as we’ve discussed, there’s suspense to be had too).
Some contenders have opted out of phase 2 voting window spectacles entirely. The cast of Shogun, for example, is scattered around the world, so FX is (correctly) relying on those 25 nominations to speak for themselves. But I’m grateful to see a few stunts happening out there, especially the fun and imaginative ones, to make the final weeks of Emmy season feel less like a slog and more like one last celebration.
Speaking of reasons to celebrate: The team behind Peacock’s The Traitors broke through with a best reality competition series nomination this year, as well as a nod for host Alan Cumming and many members of the production team. It will be facing the formidable RuPaul’s Drag Race in both categories, but having just completed filming on its third season, it’s clearly in an ascendant mode, as I learned when catching up with six of the show’s Emmy-nominated creatives on Zoom last week.
Together we broke down an especially dramatic episode from season two — featuring one of the most endlessly memed lines — and I learned just how surprisingly real this extremely made-up reality show can feel when you’re in the middle of it. Read on for more on the funeral procession that took a surprising turn, and the moment that brought us “oh sweet baby Jesus, not Ekin-Su.”
A Giddy Gathering
All of the Traitors contestants show up knowing the score. As veterans of other reality shows, they’ve already been trained how to speak in confessionals, how to raise the stakes of any interaction and how to get very invested in the kind of stunts and games that make reality TV a joy to watch.
But none of the people who work behind the scenes on The Traitors were prepared for what happened when the contestants dressed up in black and followed a fake funeral procession to three fake graves, where they learned their compatriot Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu had been (fake) poisoned the night before.
“As they were walking down into our section of that filming, you could literally feel the tension,” says the episode’s director Ben Archerd. “We try to create this world for them, and it genuinely felt like they were coming down in a funeral procession.”
“It really felt like somebody had died,” adds Cumming, with the wry smile so familiar to fans of the show. “I remember there was one of the bits [in another episode] with Larsa [Pippen], and her boyfriend Marcus [Jordan] had been killed. She was genuinely choking back tears. And I said, ‘Larsa, he’s not really dead.’”
The contestants were handed black roses to throw into one of three coffins, where their compatriots Parvati Shallow, MJ Javid and Ekin-Su were lying with eyes closed. (Only Shallow and her fellow traitors knew that she was the one who had “poisoned” Ekin-Su in the first place.) The group treated the game with somber reverence, especially when Ekin-Su was revealed as the victim by Cumming slamming her coffin door shut.
Executive producer Sam Rees-Jones calls that graveyard scene “one of the most exciting things I’ve been involved in filming,” and adds that the cast began throwing soil on Ekin-Su’s “grave” entirely unprompted. “I was giddy watching it. We could have cut a 20-minute scene from that and just let it play out, because it felt like a funeral from a drama. It was hugely exciting.”
No one would call anything that happens on The Traitors real, of course. Gathering 21 reality television veterans for weeks of challenges and backstabbing, the show crosses the Agatha Christie murder mystery format with the familiar gamesmanship of modern reality TV. But with its filming location on the grounds of a real Scottish castle and Cumming there giving his all to the role of the wicked and all-knowing host, the atmosphere is convincing to everyone who steps into it, contestant or not.
Siggi Rosen-Rawlings, who alongside Matt Wright serves as the show’s director of photography, says that for the more dramatic and atmospheric scenes, even the camera crew gets in on the act. “We keep hushed voices,” he says of filming the torchlit nighttime scenes when the traitors don robes and pick which of their teammates to kill off. “In the camera department, we don’t really want to make eye contact with them. We want to be part of the game, but we want to be distant from them so we don’t affect the game at all.”
A Live-ish Production
Even while preserving some production secrets for themselves, the Traitors team make their work sound like an elaborately orchestrated live production, or maybe even a sporting event. From a control room within the castle Rees-Jones can see each camera live, and sometimes narrates the action for Cumming in an earpiece — even when the host is on camera.
“Sometimes Sam comes on inside my ear and asks me questions whilst I'm prancing down the stairs in some insane outfit,” says Cumming. “I’m trying not to move my lips or show that I am talking to Sam, so that I don’t have to do it again.”
In the breakfast scenes that open most episodes, neither Cumming nor the producers know exactly how the cast will react — and they really weren’t prepared for what became an iconic moment in the funeral episode, when traitor Phaedra Parks reacted to the news of Ekin-Su’s poisoning with . . . well, you’ve probably seen the clip:
“It does feel good when you are on the right person at exactly the right time,” says Rosen-Rawlings, who manages seven camera operators and four robotic cameras in the breakfast room alone. Adds Rees-Jones, “We knew she was going to be gold. I mean, we didn’t quite know that she’d give that iconic line. We didn’t realize that would become a thing.”
The Traitors team has already wrapped production on season three, which has recruited the likes of Tom Sandoval, Bob the Drag Queen and Sam Asghari, best known as Britney Spears’s ex. Archerd says they used locations on the show’s Scottish estate that they never knew existed in previous seasons, but otherwise they’re keeping mum on the details.
Whatever happens, though, rest assured that whatever drama comes through on the screen was almost certainly being experienced in real life. “I don’t direct live TV,” says Archerd. “But it’s as close to live as I’ve ever directed.”
