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Here's How The Traitors' Alan Cumming Created His "Camp" Hosting Accent
The producers of the reality series wanted Cumming to "camp it up" for his part as the show's host.
Alan Cumming is Scottish ... but he isn’t really that Scottish. Fans know that the actor, author, and advocate, who serves as the host of the hit reality show The Traitors, sports a dramatic, exaggerated Scottish burr when he lets the reality TV all-stars know what their latest challenge will be at the Highlands castle where the show is filmed. But how did this amped-up version of his natural voice come to be?
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How Catherine O'Hara's Moira Rose inspired The Traitors accent
Cumming told BBC that the producers of the series, which is the U.S. version of a Dutch TV show, wanted him to “camp it up” for his hosting duties. So, he ran his own natural accent through an especially dramatic filter, so to speak. According to Cumming, his accent on The Traitors is "me playing Moira Rose from Schitt's Creek playing Alan Cumming."
Fans of the award-winning comedy series from father-and-son duo Dan and Eugene Levy will immediately understand the nod to Schitt's Creek matriarch, Moira Rose, played by Catherine O'Hara. While O'Hara's been known to ham it up for past comedic roles, nothing tops the hilariously theatrical Transatlantic accent she sports as Moira.
This overtly Scottish persona, Cumming said, wasn’t just entertaining for viewers but it also helped The Traitors’ contestants — many of whom are reality TV veterans from shows like Survivor, Big Brother, and the various Real Housewives series — get in the right headspace to compete in The Traitors’ high-stakes take on the party game Mafia.
"It heightens the drama, they understand how to do drama,” Cumming said.
Embracing Bond villain status for The Traitors
The accent and outsized character Cumming is adopting helps put him in a different mindset, too. The actor, who played a minor villain in the James Bond movie Goldeneye, said he was getting shades of a 007 nemesis when watching live feeds of the contestants scheming and competing while in his dressing room.
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"I can see them. I do feel like a James Bond villain," Cumming told the BBC, mimicking petting a cat the way Bond’s arch-nemesis Ernst Blofeld does. As of Season 2 of The Traitors, Cumming actually has an animal to pet. His dog Lala wasn’t able to travel to the castle for the filming of the first season, but she was in his lap for the sophomore outing.
Tom Sandoval, "Boston Rob" Mariano, Chrishell Stause, and Bob the Drag Queen are among some of the contestants who will hear Cumming’s accent firsthand in the upcoming third season of The Traitors, which does not yet have a premiere date. You can hear him for yourself right now by streaming Seasons 1 and 2 on Peacock.
