Meryl Williams has told the new Traitors cast to stay low-key, avoid crying and blend into the background. She also wants the Faithfuls to play clueless until the end, a sharper instruction than the usual reality-show pep talk. The advice lands as Celebrity Traitors returns with Maya Jama, Bella Ramsey, Romesh Ranganathan, Joe Lycett and James Acaster in the line-up.
Meryl Williams and Wilf
Williams won the first series of The Traitors in 2022, and she is now speaking from the one point that matters in a game built on pressure: having survived it. “As a faithful, I would just try and play clueless until the end, and then if you have any suspicions, you need to bring them up. It makes you an easy target, and people also feel threatened by you,” she said.
She drew a line between the Faithfuls and the Traitors. “For the traitors, they should try and blend as much as they can into the background. Try not to single one person out and raise suspicions.” That is the kind of advice that turns the early episodes into an exercise in restraint, not volume.
Crying at the round table
Williams was blunt about emotion. “Avoid the crying, it makes everything so much more dramatic, and then it becomes obvious that you’re hiding something,” she said. For a cast that includes well-known names, the practical message is simple: the more a player performs panic, the more useful they become to the rest of the table.
She added a complication to that rule. “Wilf went so far because he genuinely started to believe that he was faithful. In order to win the game as a traitor, you need to truly believe you’re faithful, and then you start to convince everyone else.” That is the mechanism Williams is pointing to: not just lying, but sustaining the lie long enough for it to stop looking like one.
Final week pressure
Williams said the game only felt winnable late on. “It just all becomes more real,” she said, describing the final week of her series. “The money was something that always felt unachievable and out of reach, but as we approached the final week we were like ‘right we could actually do this you know!’”
She also said the round tables took a couple of hours, with some filming indoors before the cast went outside, and that the outdoor scenes did not happen until around 11pm or midnight because of the long Scottish summer evenings. She called Claudia Winkleman’s glam squad “very jealous,” but the bigger point is less cosmetic: the celebrities are entering a game where patience, not volume, is the currency. If they take Williams seriously, the first move is to stop trying to look impressive and start trying to look ordinary.
