Here’s Where The Cast Of The Traitors Sleep (And Other BTS Secrets)

Season 3 of The Traitors is back on Peacock, and viewers are already hooked! Alongside the twists and turns of challenges, murders, and banishings, fans want to know what happens behind the reality show’s scenes.

The Traitors US and UK both film in Ardross Castle, a stunning 19th Century castle in Scotland. Although the show makes it appear like the participants sleep in the castle, host Alan Cumming told Daily Beast that the Traitors and Fithfuls sleep in a much less glamorous location.

The reality TV show is based on a Dutch format and sees a group of people staying in a historic castle or house, playing a game similar to Mafia. The key to the game is to make sure the Traitors can eliminate people without being caught by the Faithfuls.

Do Contestants On ‘The Traitors’ Sleep At The Famous Castle?

In early 2025, actor and The Traitors US host Alan Cumming let audiences peek behind the curtain at how the Peacock show really works. He explained to The Daily Beast that the cast of the show sleeps in a £70-a-night (roughly $85) Inverness Airport Hotel, which is a 40-minute drive from the castle.

How glamorous, you come to Scotland, and you stay in the Inverness Airport Hotel. I stayed in a little house in Inverness. But I had a room in the castle where I would get made up and dressed.

Alan continued, “It had a huge bed in it. So I did actually sleep quite often, but not overnight.”

When the round table ends, all the show’s participants leave the castle and go to lodgings near Inverness Airport. They return in the morning, where the breakfast scenes are filmed. The breakfast scenes are usually filmed closer to lunchtime, with the cast already eating breakfast back in their hotel, which is why you rarely see people eating the head spread laid out in front of them.

The Season 3 Cast of The Traitors

The UK version’s host, Claudia Winkleman, confirmed on Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett’s podcast, Dish, also explained that the players are kept apart to ensure they can not talk over the day’s events. “So everybody is man-marked, they have somebody who is looking after them, and when they leave the castle, they don’t see each other until they arrive at breakfast.”

Claudia also explained how the Traitors can plot their murders without anyone seeing them. “Everybody leaves, including the Traitors… and then they’re brought back, about an hour later.”

According to ScreenRant, Season 1 star Arie Luyendyk Jr. told Us Weekly that contestants should not expect to get any more than six hours of sleep, especially if they are picked as a Traitor. “You’re there for so long and it’s one of those things where we probably started at 8 or earlier and we probably were up till about 12 to 2 in the morning, depending on if you’re the Traitor or not, because the Traitors had to do their thing after the whole day was finished.”

Who Chooses The Traitors And How Do They Murder Without Being Seen?

The Traitors revolves around contestants enlisted as Traitors murdering a Faithful. Each night, the Traitors will choose a Faithful to eliminate from the game. At the daily round table, the contestants vote out the contestant they think is the Traitor.

As reported by Pink News, Claudia Winkleman explained that she plays a role in choosing who will play the Faithful and who will be the Traitor. Alan Cumming, who acts as a producer as well as host on the US version, also plays a role in picking who will take center stage as the Traitor.

• On their separate franchises, they both interview the whole cast to ensure they pick someone who is “passionate for the role.”

Vulture reported, “The producers decided on their Traitors shortly after the interviews, a couple of hours before the tapping-on-the-shoulder ceremony.”

Executive Producer Mike Cotton told Variety that they give contestants a 600-question psych evaluation test to “see attributes that might make someone a good liar or particularly deceptive.” This is done to ensure the producers cast an “interesting mix of characters that will bring their own unique skill set to it.”

We actually don’t know who the Traitors are until that pick, where Alan walks around and taps them on the shoulder.

Mike continued, “We watch how they interact when they arrive at the castle. Alan does these chats with them, sitting down and asking them if they’d like to be a Traitor and why. That has a really big bearing on it, as does Alan’s opinion.”

The show’s production team goes to great lengths to ensure that Faithfuls do not discover who the Traitors are before being voted out at the round table. “It’s a massive military operation each night to get the Faithful to bed in individual rooms and get the Traitors back out to have their meeting,” producer Mike Cotton told Variety in January 2024.

Arie admitted the round tables are much more “intense” than they appear on TV. “It got really intense, you know, a lot of crying, a lot of pointing fingers, a lot of below-the-belt stuff that they didn’t show on TV,” he told Us Weekly in 2023.

“I feel like they kind of kept it pretty chill on TV, but I felt like it was in real life a lot more intense. … I think if it got a little too raw or a little too mean, they just omitted it, you know? They kept it more about the game.”

Other Rules Contestants On The Traitors Have To Follow

The contestants must follow some basic rules to ensure the show is produced to the highest level and is fair. One of the key rules of filming The Traitors is that contestants can’t interact with each other outside of filming. This means their personal belongings and their phones were taken away during filming.

Shahs of Sunset star Mercedes “MJ” David explained on the Just Sayin’ podcast. “When we got off the plane, I was like, ‘Oh you’re taking our phones, right now,’ ” she said. “You’re gonna take everything — they take your chargers, your watch, your passport, your wallet, your money.”

Season 1 and 2 contestant Kate Chastain told Vanity Fair in January 2023 that the production even hired security guards to keep the contestants apart after filming.

“You’re not supposed to talk about the game when the mics aren’t ready or the cameras aren’t on, because if we say something that’s important and it’s not on camera, they can’t use it on the show,” Season 2 star and Big Brother legend Dan Gheesling told Business Insider.

• Season 2’s Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu told US Weekly in January 2024 that there was a limit to how much they could drink.
• The contestant’s contracts specify they can not use their time on the show to flaunt their own brands.
• Peacock has ensured that every player has their own welfare team member.
• The contestants do not know who else will be staying with them beforehand to avoid them researching each other.
• The production dictates the order in which people come into breakfast.

The Traitors streams new episodes every Thursday at 9:00pm on Peacock.