Richard E Grant, are you OK hun? There were gasps across the nation last night as the British actor, vibrating with excitement, told all his fellow Celebrity Traitors contestants that he had been picked as a Traitor, mere minutes after being selected by Claudia Winkleman at the top-secret roundtable. “What are you?” comedian Joe Lycett had innocently asked Grant in the bar, to which the star replied with a gleeful shrug: “A Traitor.”
Lycett spoke for all of us when he came back with a baffled “You what?!” Cue lots of perplexed laughter and mumblings about how Grant is certainly taking an “interesting” approach to the game. Grant then spent the rest of the episode manically back-pedalling and claiming he was actually a Faithful, but had said he was a Traitor as a joke. “I thought it would be like an ‘I am Spartacus!’ moment,” he insisted, with a giant, slightly crazed smile.
There are two possibilities here. Either, the Withnail & I actor has made the most epic mistake the show has ever seen, or he’s gone for the boldest double bluff. I, for one, believe that Grant, one of our finest living actors, had a brain fart. Grant said himself, in between wheezes of laughter in one of his to-camera interviews, that he “was so thrilled to be chosen as a Traitor that, in my unguarded excitement, I said, ‘Of course I’m a Traitor.’ I clearly need to diffuse all the heat that’s coming in my direction.” He then signed off with a typically old-fashioned sigh of “Oh brother!”, and looked like he wanted to be swallowed whole by the unforgivably orange velvet armchair he was sitting on (can someone please banish Ardross Castle’s interior designer – they must be stopped).
The words of executive producer Sarah Fay, while speaking at a press screening before the show aired on television, also implied Grant had made a blunder. She said of her first reaction to the scene: “It was a mixture of a little bit of sick coming up in my mouth, and a punch [of the air] at the same time. We’ve never had anything like that happen before. I mean, within five minutes of being out of the round table, you’ve already mucked up. I still can’t believe it now. Richard E Grant, how iconic.”
At least the slip-up occurred before he took the Traitors’ oath. Winkleman could barely keep a straight face as she asked him: “Do you vow to keep your identity and the identity of your fellow Traitors a secret?”
But what if Grant is actually playing a very clever game, and exaggerating his quirks and overall flappiness in order to confuse the other players and make them underestimate him? I think this might be giving him too much credit, but whether this is the case or not, he seems to be getting away with it. “I just don’t believe Richard’s a Traitor,” drawled former model Jerry Hall. “I’ve known him for 30 years and he’s my neighbour. He says and does eccentric things. I think he’s acting out because he’s not been chosen.” Ross Kemp, who needs a whole think-piece of his own, was in too much of a paranoid spiral after being touched on the arm by Little Mix’s Leigh-Anne Pinnock to be of any use to anyone. Industry star Myha’la also said she thinks Grant’s “too smart” to make a mistake like that. Even Grant’s fellow Traitor, the presenter Maya Jama, said she believed the move would be “too obvious” – before she met him in the turret and saw that he actually is a Traitor.
This wouldn’t be the first time a group of Faithfuls have infuriatingly ignored a humungous, waving red flag. Remember last year, when Alan Carr – who went on to win – couldn’t say the words “I’m a Faithful” without collapsing into fits of guilty giggles?
The only person who seems to have their head screwed on at the moment is comedian James Acaster. “I want us to home in as close to facts as we can get,” said poor old Acaster, who seems destined for recruitment to the turret after a major twist where he and Amol Rajan have to beg for survival on show. “He said he was a Traitor. He said it out loud!”
Epic mistake or not, Grant’s fellow Traitor Jama is now left to pick up the pieces. “It’s like having an unhinged uncle running wild in the castle,” she said. “That is my partner in crime.” Grant’s behaviour just shows that you never know quite what to expect from this brilliant game of deception and backstabbing. Winkleman put it best when she reacted to Grant’s confession: “It’s… new.”
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