The Traitors Australia is undoubtedly one of the most talked-about shows of 2026. While the clever gameplay, devilish twists, and iconic presence of reality TV royalty Gretel Killeen all contributed to the show’s enormous success, there’s no denying the contestants made the series so enjoyable to watch.
From cutthroat Survivor players and fan favourite Love Islanders to familiar Australian Idol stars and dramatic Housewives, the cast was the perfect mix of strategic minds, nostalgic faces and outspoken personalities — which is exactly what Network 10’s Executive Producer Ciaran Flannery set out to achieve.
With this year’s season done and dusted and fans begging for the series to be renewed in 2027, PEDESTRIAN.TV spoke with Flannery about how producers created the perfect cast and selected the Traitors themselves.
Deciding to have a reality TV cast on The Traitors Australia
There are three different versions of The Traitors around the world: everyday people, celebrities, and reality stars. After using no-name participants in the first two seasons (with a handful of familiar faces sprinkled into season two), the 2026 season saw the Aussie series take a page from the US version’s handbook by casting 22 reality TV stars.
Flannery said producers “genuinely weighed all three up with equal strength” at the start, but it quickly became a “no-brainer” to do a reality TV season once Gretel was cast as the show’s host.
“The idea of having Gretel as this sort of character who lives in this creepy mansion who invites 22 reality TV stars to come and murder each other at her home, it was almost too delicious not to do, to be honest,” he said.
“And look, there’s a little bit of it where you think reality stars will have a bit more pull through social media and their other platforms. So since we’re relaunching it after a little break, there was also a bit of a logic to the publicity around it.”
From there, the team began pulling together their dream cast of contestants — all of whom immediately said yes because of how much of a phenomenon the series has become. What mattered most, however, was casting people who genuinely wanted to play and win the game rather than to appear on TV to be famous.
“We speak to the Dutch creators of this show in a lot of depth because they’ve learned so much over the years, and they could not impress upon us more that if you’re going to cast known people, you have to cast it for the game,” he shared. “Don’t chase fame because the best seasons ever made are always because the cast is well balanced, not because someone was incredibly famous.”
How producers cast The Traitors Australia
This year’s season of The Traitors Australia received wide praise for its diversity and made history by starting the game with an all-queer lineup of original Traitors inside the turret.
Flannery said casting for the series began with a focus on diversity: ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age. From there, they created “quite a complicated grid” of different reality shows to decide how many people from each franchise would participate in the ultimate reality TV crossover.
“Basically, if you cast someone in a particular show of a particular age and gender, that sort of ticks that box. It was a lot of mental mind maps to make sure we had the big picture as well as just chasing individuals,” he detailed.
“You basically write a long list, you cast the number of people you need, you double it, add a few more, and then you start calling your favourites and hope they say yes — which in our case, essentially, we got all our favourites. So it’s complicated, but I would say it was one of the easiest shows for us to ever cast because of how keen everyone was to do it.”
In addition to building a cast that represented different reality shows and diversities, it was also important to select a range of different personalities for the game.
“So there needs to be a certain number of strategic minds in there who are going to come in and be the beautiful mind of the game, and you need a certain number of people who will play with emotion, and people who might be fast to throw a finger over accusation,” he said.
“Perhaps people who you would expect to be a little quieter, but who we hope we can see grow and develop within a game, because you need stories of people who change.”
Keira Maguire, for example, is someone who not only has proven experience creating great TV moments on The Bachelor franchise, but was also “desperate to play the game and try to win it”.
Her co-star Alex Nation also served as the “empathetic” player who played with her heart and soul, and Cosima De Vito and Dicko brought the nostalgia factor to the game.
“You need people in the game who aren’t just going to be cold-blooded murderers; people who are going to react in an emotional way because you get the stories that we did end up getting,” Flannery commented. “If everyone was just there like a Survivor player, you would never get that.”
While Rob Farnham wasn’t a reality star, his appearance mirrored that of Travis Kelce’s mum Donna and Zac Efron’s brother Dylan on the US series.
“They always have a random family member of someone famous, and it has worked year after year. There’s just something about the fish out of water story of one person who’s in there with all these reality stars, and then there’s just like, someone’s mum or son,” he said.
“When we decided to do a reality TV season, we just had a conversation here with the producers, ‘Should we get a family member as well?’. We met Rob, and we were just like, this is a no-brainer, let’s get Rob in. His dad is obviously an Aussie legend, and for a show that goes internationally, I think having the son of John Farnham just made sense.”
Selecting the OG Traitors
Perhaps the most important part of casting The Traitors is selecting the three people who will wear the iconic red cloaks and murder their co-stars in the conclave each evening.
Similar to how fans of the series sit around debating for hours about who the Traitors should be, Flannery said the show’s production team has the same discussions before filming begins. However, they don’t lock anything in until the cast arrive at the manor and have a sit-down conversation with Gretel.
“We sit in a room and just chew the fat, and we talk about what the different combinations would be, but we do not decide at all who they’ll be until the cast have already arrived,” he said.
“You’ll see in episode one, we call them the silver chats because they have a conversation with Gretel in a room with the silver in the middle, and we show a kind of montage of that. But all those chats are like 10, 15 minutes of conversation, and we watch every minute of all 22 conversations, and that gives you the biggest insight as to where their head is at on day one.”
Flannery said it’s only after producers watch each of those interviews that the three Traitors are decided, and it’s “always about a balance”.
“You can’t just have three master strategists in a conclave because that’s not fun. You need there to be different types of people, and you’ve got to think about how those relationships within the three will develop, as well as how they’ll play,” he explained.
“And most importantly, they’ve got to want to do it. I don’t think it would ever work to have someone as a Traitor who just never wanted to be a Traitor; there’s got to be a kind of delicious sort of excitement to that role. So lots of different things come into it.”
@thetraitorsau The Traitors have been selected, let the game begin 🎭🗡 #TheTraitorsAU | Stream Now on @Channel 10
♬ original sound – The Traitors AU
Season four of The Traitors Australia is yet to be confirmed, but it seems to be only a matter of time as producers have been “over the moon” at how the series has performed. The big question now is simply whether they continue casting reality TV stars, or adapt to a regular or full-blown celebrity cast.
“I would just say that in my mind and the mind of the network, all three of them are still very much options moving forward for this show,” he teased.
“I’ve had a lot of phone calls. There are a lot of people who want to do this show. I’ve been working in the industry for 20-plus years, and there is just a buzz about this game that transcends the concept of being on television.”
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