Celebrity Traitors producer shares if Richard E Grant really slipped up with Traitor reveal

Celebrity Traitors returned on Thursday and the first episode was already full of drama as Richard E Grant casually just told everyone he is a Traitor, but did he really slip up? Or was it a tactical move? A producer has revealed it was a genuine blunder. 

Straight after leaving the Round Table, where he was tapped on the shoulder and chosen to be a Traitor by Claudia Winkleman, Grant headed into the lounge and was asked by comedian Joe Lycett if he was a Traitor or a Faithful. He blurted out in response: “I am a Traitor.”

Lycett couldn’t believe what he was hearing and asked: “Are you?” Grant then casually tried to play it off by joking: “What’s the point in being in the game if you’re not?” The actor later told the camera it was the “biggest mistake of my life”. 

“I was so thrilled to have been chosen as a Traitor that, in my unguarded excitement, I said, ‘Of course, I’m a Traitor.’ I clearly need to defuse all the heat that’s coming in my direction,” he said. Everyone was convinced it was part of his game plan, but according to executive producer Sarah Fay, he really did just “muck up”.

Credit: BBC

She told Radio Times: “It was a mixture of a little bit of sick coming up in my mouth and a punch at the same time. We’ve never had anything like that happen before. I mean, within five minutes of being out of the roundtable, he’d already mucked up!”

“I still can’t believe it now. But yeah, I mean, how iconic! And as producers, you always want to make sure the series are fresh and new. And we’ve been very lucky so far. We’ve just come back from filming our seventh series.

“We’ve just finished civilian, and every single series, luckily, the cast brings something completely different. But never in our wildest dreams did we think that we’d have a Traitor admit they were a Traitor five minutes after the roundtable.”

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According to The Sun, his blunder is now so famous at the Traitors production firm Studio Lambert that staff there refer to making a mistake as “Doing a Reg”. “Reg” is Richard E Grant’s initials.

Credit: BBC

A TV insider said: “This was a bit of a shocking scenario for producers — they don’t want anyone ‘doing a Reg’ under any circumstances. Of course you’d think it went without saying that you don’t reveal you’re a Traitor, but now they’re making it abundantly clear like never before.” 

Claudia Winkleman said Richard he was just so “giddy” about being picked to be a Traitor that it made him accidentally slip up.

Speaking after a screening of episode one, she said: “He was just so happy, he just couldn’t believe it. We go into a room after I’ve interviewed them all, and they say, ‘This is what I want to be’. You just couldn’t not give it to him. You couldn’t not, because he wanted it so much, and he was compelling.

“And he’s Richard E Grant, I couldn’t believe that he was actually in the castle. He was giddy, and about five minutes later, he went ‘Oh!'” If that was the first episode, we’re in for a wild ride. 

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