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Celebrity Traitors star Nick Mohammed has shed some light on what actually unfolds when the contestants leave the castle for the night.
The Ted Lasso star appeared on last year’s inaugural season of the BBC series, alongside the likes of Celia Imrie and Joe Marler. Alan Carr went on to win the series, backstabbing his way to victory.
Speaking on Jessie Ware’s Table Manners podcast, Mohammed let slip some behind-the-scenes details of the hit programme – including what happens as the stars leave the castle every evening in a convoy of Land Rovers.
“You didn’t get that much downtime really,” said the actor. “It looks in the programme like you get in those cars and go off, but it’s a more elaborate way out of the castle because they don’t want you to see who’s going in what direction.
“You’re actually in a holding area and dismissed at random, so you have no way of knowing whether someone’s been dismissed early and what that might mean.”
Much time is spent in this “holding area”, with Mohammed going on to recall ways that they would pass the time, including him showing off some of the magic tricks in his arsenal. The actor is also a trained close-up magician.
“I remember showing Claire [Baldwin] a trick, and I think Jonathan [Ross] showed a trick as well,” he said. “We were just talking about magic, and I loved that; it was fun.”
Despite cutaway scenes showing contestants getting ready to sleep in the bedrooms of Andross Castle, the cast – celebrity and otherwise – are, in fact, driven to a hotel where they all sleep.
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Elsewhere on the podcast, Mohammed spoke about the isolation of filming and being away from his family for weeks.
“You’ve got no access to the outside world, or you don’t have your phone on you, or anything like that during it,” he said. “I was allowed once a day to FaceTime them [his children], but only with the producers listening into the phone calls […] because if anything gets out, the game was over, really.
“So that was the most difficult thing, and not being able to tell them exactly when I would be going because I didn’t know, and I could be back in 48 hours. I could be gone in three weeks, which turned out I was.”
Mohammed survived the entire game as a Faithful, making it all the way to the series finale where he finished as a joint runner-up alongside David Olusoga.
The actor is not the only one to have spoken about the difficulties of entering the game as a parent. In an interview with The Independent, Daisy May Cooper revealed that her children were a factor in her decision to pull out of the first series.
Speaking to The Independent in a new interview, Cooper confirmed that she and her brother, Charlie, were originally meant to compete in the series, but withdrew after hearing about the living conditions and the fact that she would have little contact with her family for two weeks.
Cooper shares two children with her ex-husband, and a two-year-old son with partner Anthony Huggins.
The second season of Celebrity Traitors is currently on the BBC, with Traitors Maya Jama, James Acaster, and King Kenny, real name Kenny Oghenovo Ojuederie, hoping to evade suspicion until the finale on Friday (30 October).