During the first episode of the second season of The Traitors, contestant MJ Javid referred to host Alan Cumming as “a chef’s kiss of a human.” While I might disagree with some of MJ’s game play this season, I have to agree with her completely on this assessment.
Cumming is, in all honesty, the main reason I was even interested in Peacock’s reality series when it first came out in 2023. Many of the most iconic, enduring competition shows like Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race are hosted by veteran TV presenters. Jeff Probst, Julie Chen Moonves, Phil Keoghan, they’re all known for being themselves and for being relatively objective, personable, and straightforward. Alan Cumming though? The BAFTA and Tony Award-winning actor seemed like an exciting and somewhat unlikely choice to host a reality show, until it became clear that it’s not actually Alan Cumming hosting, it’s his alter ego, “Alan Cumming.” The latter is an eccentric who lives in a vast Scottish castle with his peacocks and other exotic birds, who delivers every word with exaggerated flourish and accentuates every scene with his capes and kilts, and you literally can’t take your eyes off of him or his wardrobe. (“It’s the campest thing I’ve ever done — and that’s me saying that,” Cumming said of the show in an interview last year.)
Though he’s playing a character, Cumming has made a point of fully inhabiting the role. Last season in a conversation with the New York Times, Cumming admitted that he actually brought a lot of those fashions to set. “Perhaps, rather alarmingly, the vast majority of the clothes were mine.” (Many are even embroidered with his initials, A.C.) He added that his desired aesthetic for the show is “eccentric Scottish laird,” which he nails – truly, no notes.
But on top of his – and our – appreciation for playing a whimsical dandy who looks the part, it’s the way the Cumming relishes his role as master of murders that help him steal the show. Look no further than the all-black funeral procession he led during the fourth episode where he would whisper things like “Next stop, death!” and then, after forcing three contestants into actual coffins, he closed murdered competitor Ekin-Su’s coffin, had her lowered into a hole in the ground and then told his henchman, with gusto, “Fergus! Fill her in,” as he threw dirt on it.
Cumming has said that the voice he uses for the show is actually “me playing Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek playing Alan Cumming,” and knowing that actually makes it all make so much sense now that I think back to basically any time he’s drawn out his sinister pronunciations of “murdarrh” and “traitarggh” and “my cahstle.”
Whether intentional or not, Cumming’s Tony Award-winning role as the Emcee in the Broadway revival of Cabaret – a vivacious, hedonistic narrator who manages to toggle between being a part of the show as well as an audience member watching it from a distance – feels like it inspired his role as host. He may have traded out the Kit Kat Club for a castle in the Highlands and his leather suspenders for argyll jackets, but on The Traitors, he is still every bit the master of ceremonies, and he’s relishing the chaotic show that’s being put on around him. As are we.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
