Alan Cumming, the Tony Award-winning and Emmy-nominated actor makes an unexpected arrival in the reality-competition realm as host of the new Peacock series The Traitors.
The premise of The Traitors American remake (the original is Dutch) is that a bunch of television personalities many from Bravo and CBS plus a handful of regular folk travel to Scotland to play an elaborate game of Mafia.
The majority of the contestants compete as “Faithfuls” and must figure out who among them has been assigned a “Traitor” by Cumming in order to win $250,000. They also must complete missions to earn the cash.
Meanwhile, the selected Traitors get to “murder” (send home) a suspecting Faithful each episode. If any of the Traitors make it to the end, they get to steal all the money from the Faithfuls.
Cumming talked to The Daily Beast about the show and how it came about,
I was approached over the months.
‘There’s this weird sort of a game show in a castle they’re maybe going to offer you to be the host.’
I was like, ‘What?’ And then I said,
‘Whatever happened to that weird game show in a castle?’
Then eventually, they just offered it to me. I had a call with them, and they’re telling me about it and trying to describe it to me, because it’s sort of an unusual kind of confluence of things—you know, psychological, sort of reality, and then this competition thing as well. So I remember in the call, I said,
‘It’s sort of like you want me to be like a Bond villain. And I should actually bring my dog and pet her.’
And they went,
‘That’s a good idea.’
And I thought, oh, I want to do this.
When I talked to the producers, I sort of realized why they’re asking me [to host]. They wanted me to make it into a character, and camp, and sort of heightened. So I came to it with that knowledge. And I quote Shakespeare and things all the time, and Plato.
So I had this flaring-nostril sort of persona. And you’re kind of making stuff up as you go along. Literally, sometimes, they’re feeding me lines in my ear. So it was a bit like doing stand-up comedy actually, because you’re just winging it.
And obviously the style of it and the way I looked was a big part of that as well, because obviously it’s not a naturalistic sort of thing we were going for.
I’ve never done anything like it. I mean, I’ve hosted things before, but not as this weird character in a castle. So I don’t know why they asked me. It was just a weird decision, but it seemed to work out.”
The Traitors is streaming today on Peacock starting January 12.
Watch.
(via The Daily Beast)
