In September 2023, I sat across the Round Table from Alan Cumming. I’d flown to the remote recesses of Scotland to visit Ardross Castle, where The Traitors is set, to chat with the show’s fashionable and gregarious host ahead of Season 2’s filming.
As Cumming sat discussing The Traitors, that pile of gold coins shimmering behind his shoulders, it became apparent why the Tony Award-winning actor had signed on to host a reality TV show on Peacock. He could so clearly see the show’s potential well before the cast of Season 1 ever set foot in Scotland.
“Why the show works is because we get to see people having to lie,” he said. “We all lie all the time, but we never get a chance to see people lying, knowing that they’re lying and knowing that they have to lie. It’s about this thing that we all actually do. We are all ‘Traitors’ in our lives to a certain extent.”
🎬 SIGN UP for Parade’s Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬
When Season 2 hit Peacock in January 2024, it became the No. 1 unscripted series in the U.S. across all streaming platforms and a water-cooler sensation. Nine months later, Cumming would win his first two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Host for a Reality Competition Program and Outstanding Reality Competition Program as a producer on the show. His hunch that The Traitors would strike a chord with audiences certainly paid off.
A year and a half after our first meeting in the Scottish Highlands, I sit down with the now Emmy-winning host again in the middle of Season 3’s record-breaking run. Set in Scotland and loosely based on the card game Mafia, the series sees a small secret group of “Traitors” face off against a larger faction of “Faithfuls.” Each week the Traitors “murder” one Faithful, and then the group votes to banish who they believe is a Traitor. If the last players remaining are Faithfuls, they split the cash prize, but if a Traitor remains among them, the Traitor takes it all.
This time I’m stateside with Cumming, and he’s just wrapped up shooting an appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show.
“She’s so nice and has such a lovely energy,” Cumming exclusively tells Parade of host Kelly Clarkson, while situating himself for our virtual interview. “I was telling her how much I admire her.”
If you think winning two Emmys and breaking RuPaul‘s eight-year-long winning streak has changed Cumming or gone to his head, think again. He’s been marching to the beat of his own drum since the beginning of his career, and he’s not about to change his strategy now.
“I think it was affirming rather than changing,” he says of his Emmy wins. “It’s very affirming about just going with your gut, you know? I loved the show from the start, and it’s very reassuring when something you really like and nobody else can understand why you’re doing it, all of a sudden becomes this huge juggernaut of a success.”
Steve Vaccariello
At 60, Cumming is perhaps more in the zeitgeist now than he has ever been before, presiding over The Traitors with quippy one-liners, extravagant costumes and his revved-up Scottish accent (just ask any viewer to say “murder“). His hosting, which he fashioned after a vintage James Bond villain, is the defining aspect of the show. Cumming’s mainstream breakout, four decades into his career, is particularly gratifying because he’s forged his own path.
“I like being this age. It’s very exciting,” he says. “In the same way that I subvert the form of a competition reality show host on The Traitors, I hope I’m also subverting the expectations of what you’re supposed to be like when you turn 60.”
“In terms of myself and my body,” he adds, “everything’s still working. I sort of joke that I keep waiting for something to fall off like an old car or to stop feeling horny or to stop being curious. I think that’s the thing. I’m just curious about life, and so it doesn’t feel like I’ve changed much.”
While some reality TV fans may just be meeting Cumming for the first time, he’s been building up an impressive résumé for years by following his curiosity and working against the grain.
“From the starting gate, I always did lots of weird things,” he says of his career. “I was in a soap opera [titled Take the High Road], but I was also doing Shakespeare at the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was going on weekends to do stand-up with my friends at the Edinburgh Festival. I’ve always been eclectic. From early on, I was my own man and walked my own path.”
Looking back now, Cumming is thankful he never gave into the voices of the entertainment world that told him he’d be more successful if he steered more mainstream.
“I think I’m a very big example of how good it is, and necessary and successful, to go with your gut and not be boxed in,” he says, “and to do what you want to do, what fulfills you, and what makes you happy.”
That unique flare is what makes him a great host. “He’s different from anyone else that I’ve experienced before,” Boston Rob Mariano, who’s competed on Survivor, The Amazing Race and Deal or No Deal Island as well as The Traitors, told Parade. “I appreciate his commitment to what the show is — such a theatrical, performative show. I think he embraces it.”
Related: Carolyn Wiger Reveals the Real Reason Why She Was Banished From ‘The Traitors’ (Exclusive)
Steve Vaccariello
Cumming’s acting career is long, and it includes an impressively diverse array of projects. In 1997, he appeared as a filmmaker stalking the Spice Girls in Spice World, and he’d love to get the girl group on The Traitors. “I bet some of the girls would go on,” he says. “I think it’d be hilarious, actually.”
The same year he played high school nerd-turned-rubber-manufacturing-millionaire Sandy Frink in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, a role which has earned him cult status.
“I think it’s happening,” he says of a Romy and Michele sequel. “I think it has to do with misogyny in Hollywood that the film has not been made into a sequel already. If it was two men in a successful film like that, they would have made many sequels, and as those men get older we would have thought, ‘Oh, they’re still handsome,’ but there’s a thing about seeing older women carrying a film.”
Cumming’s first big breakout role came in an Off-West End production of Cabaret, in which he played the ostentatious Emcee. He’d later reprise the role on Broadway in 1998, winning his first Tony Award, and then again in 2014, opposite Oscar nominee Michelle Williams. But as Cumming continues to chart his own course, he’s not looking back.
“I could die happy never being in Cabaret again,” he says. “People always want me to sing songs from Cabaret. The number of times I’m hosting these awards and people say, ‘Wouldn’t it be a great idea if you sang “Willkommen”?’ I was like, ‘Nope. No. Never.’ Cabaret has been so good to me and changed my life really, but I think I’m a moving-on kind of person. I feel a bit embarrassed by resting on my laurels.”
Another oddball role that certainly shaped the way a generation of fans think about Cumming is Spy Kids‘ Mr. Floop.
“It’s incredible,” Cumming says of millennials. “I remember the moment in the early noughties when young adults suddenly changed towards me. Instead of being like, ‘O.K., famous guy,’ they were like, ‘Oh, Mr. Floop, you’re a part of my childhood.’ I really, really love that’s what the majority of younger people know me from.”
Of course, Floop, the children’s television host who is entwined in a plot to kidnap adult spies and turn them into TV show characters called Fooglies, shares some DNA with Cumming’s hosting on The Traitors.
“He had great clothes,” Cumming says of Floop. “He was a bit of a dandy. He’s just sort of a sad person whose creativity was abused.”
Like many of Cumming’s characters, Floop also has a queer sensibility, perhaps because Cumming himself identifies as bisexual. From The L Word to Sex and the City (he’d “love” to guest star on And Just Like That…, btw), Cumming’s filmography is stacked with LGBTQ+ projects, and he includes The Traitors as a “queer” show as well. The theatricality, the costumes and the presence of a host that Season 3 contestant Gabby Windey dubbed “Gay God” certainly push it in that direction.
After Season 2’s only transgender contestant, Drag Race icon Peppermint, was banished first, Cumming took it upon himself to make future seasons even gayer.
“It wasn’t a good look at all for a trans woman of color to be the first person put off,” Cumming says about the unconscious biases that led to Peppermint’s exit. “That happened, and it wasn’t through any sort of blatant malice, but nonetheless, it just hurt. I was hurt by that. It hurt my sense of the way the world should be.”
“But prior to that, I had said, there are not enough queer people on this show,” Cumming continues, noting that the count of queer contestants from Seasons 2 to 3 tripled. “That’s why we’ve got so many queer people on this season, just giving more visibility to queer people. Especially now with what’s happening with [Donald] Trump‘s America. If people are scared of something because they don’t feel comfortable with it, or they don’t know people who are trans, I think seeing them on television, hopefully, will make you think that they’re not so scary, and why are you being asked to hate them so much?”
Cumming is acutely aware of the political climate that The Traitors Season 3 is airing during. As the world gets more polarized, an extremely successful television show like The Traitors is one of the few pieces of common ground remaining.
“I would say I understand how you have got to the place you are,” Cumming says, directing a message to the show’s more conservative viewers. “I think a lot of people are angry and didn’t know where to put their anger, and along came this person who offered you places and people to place your anger. But I would ask that if you love The Traitors, and you love the contestants and you love the theatricality, and frankly the queerness, of the show then maybe you should connect that to how you vote. Your government is persecuting some of the people that you love on this program.”
Related: Gabby Windey Reveals Which ‘Traitors’ Star She’s Not in Contact With After the Show (Exclusive)
Steve Vaccariello
Nowhere on The Traitors is queerness more apparent than in Cumming’s costumes. The gender-bending ensembles include traditional Scottish kilts, capes, gowns, veils, gloves and over-the-top head pieces. Cumming describes the aesthetic as “Scottish dandy, laird of the manor” (“laird” is the Scottish version of “lord”), and he works with his stylist Sam Spector to create the looks. From his flowing funeral cape in Season 2 to his Statue of Liberty-themed suiting in Season 3, Cumming’s looks each week are almost as tantalizing as the show’s murders and banishments.
Cumming’s ensembles often take inspiration from the show’s weekly mission. “The first thing is I talk to the producers and hear about each mission,” Spector said of his costuming process, “and then Alan and I talk about what we want to do for each episode.”
Many of the pieces from Season 1 were pulled directly from Cumming’s wardrobe, but the looks are evolving and growing more elaborate as the seasons progress. Cumming and Spector are already planning Season 4’s ensembles. “Next year, I think let’s do less berets,” Cumming remembers saying to Spector. “Everyone’s doing berets now. Let’s evolve our millinery.”
Cumming says the hardest part of the job is keeping secrets, both the Traitors’ identities during filming and the season’s results after filming.
“I’m the worst person at keeping a secret,” he says. After returning to New York following Season 1’s filming, Cumming was having a drink with a comedian at his bar Club Cumming.
“He said, ‘Oh, I hear you just did this reality show,'” Cumming remembers. “And I’m like, ‘Yes, it’s such fun.’ And he went, ‘Oh, I absolutely love Cirie [Fields],’ and I went, ‘Oh, she wins.’ I just told him. He still talks about it apparently, that I just ruined it for him.”
Cumming now makes a more concerted effort to keep things secret. “I understand now the water-cooler effect of the show, how important it is for everyone to be watching it together at the same time,” he says.
He’s keeping his plans for the show’s Season 4 tightly under wraps, but he reveals that the celebrity he’d most like to cast is Martha Stewart. (“She’s very resourceful, very wily. She’s got all the qualities. I think she’d be a hoot.”) A celeb he no longer wants for the show, however, is Stewart’s frequent collaborator Snoop Dogg. “I would have liked Snoop Dogg, but I don’t want him now,” he says, referencing the rapper’s performance at Trump’s inauguration. “What the hell, Snoop Dogg?”
Related: Wes Bergmann Says He Clocked Bob the Drag Queen on ‘The Traitors’ Right Away (Exclusive)
Euan Cherry/Peacock
With a Tony, two Emmys, a hit TV show and an IMDb page to die for, you’d think Cumming might have let fame go to his head, but he’s the same friendly oddball he’s always been.
“I’ve been blessed with some really, really good hosts, and Alan Cumming definitely stands out,” Wes Bergmann, a Season 3 player and The Challenge legend, told Parade. “I just shut down the bar with him the other day and got to drink with him until the wee hours of the morning. He is as great as you would want him to be. Sometimes, when you meet people that you look up to, it’s extra disappointing. I would say it was the opposite with Alan. He was even better.”
At 60 and still in his prime, Cumming says he doesn’t have a bucket list. “I think bucket lists are not very healthy,” he says, “because it means you can just put things on the back burner and never do them. I just think, go and do them. What are you waiting for?”
Related: Boston Rob Mariano Told ‘The Traitors’ Producers the Premiere Twist Was ‘Not a Good Idea’ (Exclusive)
Other than filming The Traitors Season 4 and hoping to one day launch a talk show (“Watch out, Kelly Clarkson,” he jokes), Cumming just plans on continuing to follow his gut where it leads him. And he’s not letting those Emmys go to his head.
“It’s nice to win a prize,” he says. “It’s funny. I’ve been nominated for an Emmy so many times and never won, and then to win two, it’s like that old joke about buses not coming and then loads all come at once. As [18th-century poet] Robert Burns said, ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.'” (That’s again Scottish for “often go wrong.”)
Cumming celebrated his win alongside longtime husband Grant Shaffer in the least glamorous way possible.
“I just went to a little vegan diner that I love called Vegan Glory,” he remembers. “It’s just in a little strip mall. I went there with my husband while the Emmys were still on. I got all my glam clothes off. I got changed in the car into my sweatpants. Then the next day I was back in Scotland filming.”
If Cumming wins a third Emmy, maybe he can splurge on a bottle of champagne.
Related: Sterling K. Brown Finds Power in ‘Difficult Conversations’ — They’ve Led Him to ‘Paradise’ and Beyond (Exclusive)
