Six-time Emmy nominee Alan Cumming was not the biggest fan of reality television prior to being approached to host the U.S. edition of “ The Traitors .
” Despite eventually taking the job that required keeping a watchful eye over alumni from such shows as “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” and “The Challenge,” and excelling to the point of a current Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program nomination for his work on Season 2, the Scottish star jokes, “I’m still not.” Sitting down for an interview with IndieWire in our Los Angeles studio, Cumming recalls the rest of his “The Traitors” origin story, saying he took the meeting with producers “just to kinda see what was going on. And they said that they wanted me to play this sort of character, this sort of heightened, quite theatrical host.
So I really got into the hang of it and I understood why they wanted me to do it after that.” He added, “It’s kind of a left field thing for someone like me to just suddenly be hosting a competition reality show. But I like that.
I like confounding people’s expectations.” Cumming credits his stylist Sam Specter (who also styled him for the interview) as the key figure who most helped him capture the kind of character he wanted to portray on the Peacock series also nominated for Outstanding Reality Competition Program at the 2024 Emmys . “I went to him and said all these things like Dandy Scottish laird, .