Claudia Winkleman has admitted she’s a little concerned about whether the long-awaited new season of The Traitors can live up to fans’ expectations.
The BBC reality show became a word-of-mouth hit when it began airing in 2022, with a follow-up series finally set to debut in just a few short weeks.
Speaking ahead of the series’ launch, Claudia said she and the crew “really had no idea” how much the show would blow up, claiming: “When it did well we just couldn’t believe it. It floored all of us and made us extremely happy.”
Asked about how she feels about the impending second series, the Strictly Come Dancing host said: “So excited. I’m obviously terrified people won’t like it as much as series one, but that’s normal right?”
On what fans of the show should expect from the new cast, Claudia chose her words carefully, saying: “They are all excellent. They come having seen the first series so are more quick to suspect but they all play a brilliant game. I wish I could say more but I’ll be fired…
“[Season one] definitely gave [the new cast] some tips and you can see some arrive and play the game immediately. But the game itself is so strong that however prepared you think you are, you’re not.”
Earlier this year, the show’s executive producer spoke out about how the team was planning to overcome the “difficulty” of the new contestants knowing more about what to expect than the Traitors stars from last year’s series.
“The game’s going to be different, people have watched the show now,” Studio Lambert’s Toni Ireland teased. “When [last year’s] cast came to us, they had never seen the show, they were just playing with their gut instinct and just going: ‘This is how I’m going to play this game’.
“Now, I imagine a [new] cast will have seen it, they’re going to come to us with pre-planned ideas of the way they think it’s going to go, and obviously it’s our job to make sure that they’re always kept on their toes and they don’t know what’s around every corner.”
Meanwhile, Claudia said she still finds it difficult to know who to root for once the game is in full swing.
“It’s a really strange thing, I stand at that round table trying to just melt into the walls and I’m backing both sides,” she explained. “I so want them to catch a Traitor and I also want the Traitors to get away with it. In the end I respect and admire gameplay and there’s a lot of that in this series. I want both the Faithful and Traitors to win, which is confusing.
“It definitely gets extremely tense, it did in the first series too but there’s one round table in this episode when I came out shaking.”
The Traitors will return in January 2024, after almost a year away from our screens. Find out more about the new series here.