Why Alan Cumming Goes Full 'Bond Villain' on The Traitors 

The one thing producers of The Traitors want you to know is that the show isn't produced. At least, not as much as you might think. 

“We don’t want to be ‘producer-handed,’” says executive producer Sam Rees-Jones (Dancing on Ice). “We pride ourselves that we’re not. We don’t produce; we don’t tell people who to talk to or what to talk about. We set the game out for them, give them the castle and let them play it how they want to play it. Of course, there are little moments that we sort of … you know … to kind of keep them on their toes.”

Indeed — the cast is likely en pointe by season’s end.

The Peacock series follows a group of participants as they create alliances, participate in missions and lay out their suspicions in a nightly discussion. Out of this season’s 22 players, three are secretly chosen as “traitors” and the rest remain “faithfuls.” There at the 13-foot-wide round table, in Scotland’s Ardross Castle, the faithfuls must determine whose arguments are weak and whose hold as much water as Loch Ness. Ultimately, one player is banished, and later that evening, another is “murdered” by the traitors.

The show’s format may be familiar to those who have played the party game “Mafia,” aka “Werewolf.” The goal for the faithfuls is to sniff out all the traitors before the game ends, and the goal for the traitors is to make it to the end undetected. One additional wrinkle: If any traitors remain by the end of the competition, they alone take the purse.

Missions range from the physical (swimming in a lake and assembling giant floating puzzle pieces before setting them aflame) to the mental (answering questions about castmates, revealing popular opinions) to the downright disgusting (crawling through tunnels to escape a locked cabin while heaps of bugs are dropped from above). Players persist in the hopes of adding funds to a prize pot of up to $250,000.

In January, The Traitors returned for its second season and quickly became the top unscripted series in the United States across all streaming platforms, according to Nielsen. That same month, the show’s first season won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Casting for a Reality Program, and in February, Peacock announced a third-season pickup.

The appeal of The Traitors, which also has successful permutations in Australia and the U.K., lies in the lying. Viewers are in on the secret as participants take to their designated roles or flounder under the pressure. There are no villains in the traditional vein of reality television. People are duplicitous because that is the role they are given.

The traitors are selected based on various factors, including the contestants’ own requests (lending truth to the claim some make that they would “never be a traitor”), interviews with the producers and a sit-down conversation with host Alan Cumming (Schmigadoon!).

“We were talking about it right up until the [first roundtable],” Cumming says, referring to the occasion where the traitors are chosen from a blindfolded cast. “And then, at the last minute, they had a big confab about it in the control room, and they said, ‘Okay, we’re going with these people.’ So, it’s exciting, but it’s also terrifying, because I could screw it all up — like if I accidentally touch the wrong person,” says Cumming, who does one practice round of shoulder taps for the cameras. “They obsess about my steps!”

The actor takes his role as a heightened Highlander seriously. Cumming created a slightly sinister, sometimes punk, always arch character, rounded out by his native Scottish brogue. At his initial meeting with the producers, they explained the role would require a certain amount of macabre drama. “I said, ‘Oh, it’s like a James Bond villain,’” Cumming recalls. “And they went, ‘Yes!’”

Wearing Scottish kilts and plenty of plaid, Cumming keeps it campy in outfits that regularly steal the show: a colorful mix of creations from his own closet and new fashions pulled by stylist Sam Spector, who also embellishes pieces to match the themes of the missions. For episode four’s mission, in which Cumming leads a funeral procession, Spector took inspiration from Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral and outfitted Cumming in head-to-toe black, complete with a cape and veiled fascinator. “I want the wardrobe to be really fun and exciting,” Spector says. “And I want the cast to be blown away and just gasp.”

They do exactly that. And, Cumming adds, “After the first season, people sort of expect it now.”

But the fashion from Cumming — and the contestants (one has to wonder just how many fabulous outfits viewers missed out on due to drag queen Peppermint’s early banishment) — is just the cherry on top of a murderous confection. People watch for the gameplay, the backstabbing and the contestants’ continual amazement that other players would behave dishonestly. “On The Bachelor, it’s, ‘I can’t believe he’s with another girl.’ There’s 20 of you!” Cumming says. “And on this, it’s, ‘I can’t believe you lied to me.’ The show is called The Traitors!”

Scotland is to The Traitors what New York is to Sex and the City — an ever-present character. In this case, the 24th character.

Watching an episode, you might think the verdant landscape visible through the window of the breakfast room, where contestants sit at a long L-shaped table and wait to learn who was murdered, is accomplished via greenscreen. But if you take in just a glimpse of Ardross Castle’s 2,000-acre property in Ross-shire county, Scotland’s natural beauty will quickly disabuse you of that notion.

The producers use this to their advantage and set almost all of the missions outdoors. Ahead of this season, production designer Mathieu Weekes even added to the outdoor space with a gazebo-like structure made for clandestine conversations backed by sweeping vistas.

Inside the Victorian-era castle, the filming area grew to include a scullery, where players gather and discuss strategy before a roundtable. That, or make coffee. But even in this small kitchen the game’s true intent is never forgotten: Above the hanging copper pots and pans, carved into stone (or what appears to be stone), is the phrase “Prope amicos tene” — Latin for “Keep your friends close.”

Throughout the set, Weekes notes, “Nothing that we’ve put in touches the fabric of the building, just to ensure that we don’t damage anything.” The set design is a clever mix of existing elements — windows, doors, fireplaces and some fixtures — and structures built to conceal the rigging for lighting and remote “hot head” cameras, which allow the producers and camera operators to remove themselves from the action and give players a sense of privacy.

In the breakfast room, special attention was paid to the lighting, which was altered after the first season to highlight the views through the windows. The library and bar — the latter of which is a light-locked room that gives the sense of evening, no matter the time — are also filled with treasures meant to suggest Cumming’s travels. This is, after all, his castle. (Just go with it.)

To give viewers a better sense of the varied locations, each room has its own color palette: The moody blue library is complete with crimson drapes; the warm golden colors of the bar are offset with a teal couch; the billiards room is outfitted with green plaid wallpaper and orange furniture; and the sunny breakfast room features contrastingly dark murals (both in color and subject matter). In this last location, Cumming greets the remaining players each morning, before taking the murdered player’s portrait from the wall and callously tossing it aside, along with a line like, “Let bygones be bygones … Bye! Gone!”

Perhaps the biggest update to the second season was moving from a cast of reality stars and reality newbies, as seen in season one, to an all-celebrity cast. “It was much cleaner and more straightforward,” Rees-Jones says. “There are two sides, and that’s traitor versus faithful — the most important sides — not celebrity versus non-celebrity.”

“I also think that having history between some of the cast, because they’ve been on the same shows, just kickstarted the season,” says executive producer Stephen Lambert (Squid Game: The Challenge).

An all-celebrity cast resulted in surprising moments for viewers, too. Who would have thought Peter Weber from The Bachelor would be a masterful game player and ringleader of “Peter’s Pals”? Or that heavyweight boxer Deontay Wilder would be overcome with emotion after banishing a faithful and choose to exit the game? Or that Big Brother winner Dan Gheesling would go toe-to-toe with The Real Housewives of Atlanta alum and fellow traitor Phaedra Parks and lose? Or that Below Deck star and Traitors season-one player Kate Chastain would be brought back mid-season and recruited as a traitor? Or that, in the season’s final moments, eventual winner Trishelle Cannatella would nearly banish her season-long ally and The Challenge costar Chris “C.T.” Tamburello, who would also ultimately go on to win?

Along with the surprising moments are the ridiculous ones. Like the paper-thin reasons players use to build a case against one another, especially early in the season. Peppermint (RuPaul’s Drag Race) looked at someone wrong; John Bercow (former U.K. House of Commons speaker) breathed wrong.

Beyond casting, crafting the missions poses its own challenges. Rees-Jones explains, “We brainstorm, we pitch to the networks, we share the missions between the BBC and NBC and we get their feedback. Then we start developing them with our art team, our health and safety team, our camera guys and our directors. Then we start seeing the visual, and we test it for multiple rounds: How difficult is it? How long should it take? Is it safe? Is it good? Is it covered well? All of those things. So, it’s a long process.”

There are some processes, however, the producers refuse to reveal. Take, for instance, the scenes in the turret where the traitors meet and conspire to determine their next victim. How does production manage to bring those players from a hotel where the cast actually stays (not in the castle as the series purports) back to said castle for filming, without the rest of the cast hearing or catching on to who’s missing?

“It’s a military operation,” Rees-Jones says, “and if we say much more, then we risk giving away everything.” “More like a special-forces military operation,” Lambert adds. “We have to take a lot of care to make sure that the faithful don’t know who the traitors are. Therefore, we have to be quite careful about how we pull the traitors away to do the turrets.”

“Season one was a bit scary, but we’re a well-oiled machine now,” Rees-Jones says.

The shroud of secrecy is apropos for a series that deals in literal cloaks and, well, not daggers, but “poisoned” chalices. This is a show, after all, that plays “The Hanging Tree,” a song from The Hunger Games’ score, before each roundtable discussion — to set the mood and discourage talking among players before filming.

“So many big games are, basically, popularity competitions, and this isn’t,” Lambert says. “I think that throws some people, because they’ve achieved fame [on other shows] by winning a popularity competition.”

The mental hoops players must jump through in order to win certainly make for compelling television and give viewers one more reason to watch: the belief that if you were playing the game, you’d have caught the liars. But, Cumming notes, “When you’re playing a game, you just forget that that’s the game.

“I’d love to talk to a psychologist about the way that it plays with your expectations, and you have this short-term memory about loyalty and betrayal,” he continues. “When they say, ‘I’m a faithful through and through,’ there’s absolutely no reason that should or could be true. But if someone just says something to you enough, that sadly becomes the truth. Look at the world we’re in now. If people just keep saying the same thing, even if it’s wrong, we eventually believe them.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #8, 2024, under the title "Life of the Land."