The Traitors US returns for a third season this week, with Peacock’s hit competition series promising to bring together a cast of “larger-than-life personalities” who’ll battle it out to win $250,000.
As fascinating as the celebrity competitors promise to be, however, they’ll be hard-pressed to outshine host Alan Cumming who is undoubtedly a larger-than-life personality in his own right.
The Scottish actor has hosted The Traitors US since it launched in 2023, and is also one of the show’s producers. The 59-year-old has won countless fans for his eccentric performance in the role, which has included donning an array of outlandish outfits and a distinctive accent that Cumming has described as “me playing Moira Rose from Schitt's Creek playing Alan Cumming.”
Cumming was born not far from the Scottish Highlands filming location of TheTraitors in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, and grew up on the east coast of the country in a similarly expansive feudal estate, Panmure Estate, where his father was head forester.
He made his television debut at the age of 19, appearing in the ITV drama Travelling Man. His big break came when he landed the lead role in Bernard and the Genie, a 1991 BBC Christmas comedy from Love Actually director Richard Curtis that also starred Rowan Atkinson and Lenny Henry.
He was introduced to an international audience in 1995 when he played Boris Ivanovich Grishenko, the cocky computer programmer who teams up with Sean Bean’s duplicitous spy in the James Bond film GoldenEye.
Fame and success gave Cumming a springboard into a deliberately eclectic film and theatre career. He won an Olivier award for his performance in Accidental Death of an Anarchist in 1991, and a Tony in 1998 as the Emcee in Sam Mendes’acclaimed production of Cabaret. In 1997 he appeared in two cult comedies: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and the camp Spice Girls vehicle Spice World. A couple of years later he worked with Stanley Kubrick on the late director’s final film Eyes Wide Shut.
Since the turn of the century, Cumming has appeared in all three Spy Kids movies as television star Fegan Floop, and played the blue-skinned Nightcrawler in 2003’s X-Men sequel X2. Two decades later, he told The Independent he doubted he’d ever return to a superhero franchise. “Never say never,” said Cumming. “But those films take forever, and you end up acting with a big screen and dots on your head. It’s fun, but I like things where you have to speak to real people more and wear actual costumes.”
Along with his varied acting career, Cumming has also written a novel, Tommy’s Tale, and a pair of memoirs. He is a prominent LGBTQ activist, fundraising for organisations including the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. In 2023, he made headlines when he announced he was returning his OBE, saying that since he first accepted it his eyes had been “opened” to the “way the British empire profited at the expense (and death) of indigenous peoples across the world”.
Even for someone with such a broad-ranging résumé, Cumming’s decision to host The Traitors felt like an unexpected left turn. Yet the decision has paid off, winning him a fifth Emmy nomination. He was previously nominated three times for playing campaign manager Eli Gold on The Good Wife and once for co-hosting the Tony Awards with Kristin Chenoweth in 2016.
More importantly, The Traitors has delivered Cumming another flamboyant role he can sink his teeth into. “I act my socks off in The Traitors, just like I did on The Good Wife,” he recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “And it’s this very juicy thing like I do in the theater or would do at the Tonys.”
The Traitors US returns on January 9 at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Peacock. The first three episodes of the season will be released all at once before switching to weekly releases on Thursdays thereafter, with the finale airing on March 6.
