Most of The Traitors: New Blood cast want to murder each other
NBC announced the cast of The Traitors: New Blood, and all of them want to murder each other. In the game. Playing as Traitors. It’s not real. No one really dies. Unlike ABC’s Whodunnit, which apparently murdered its contestants.
Before we get to their blood lust, the new cast of 22 includes:
- two realtors
- two people with the same name (Abby/Abbey)
- a “content creator” with 1.2 million Instagram followers
- an author described in a profile as “Nora Ephron and Erma Bombeck had a love child who grew up watching Real Housewives with one eyebrow raised and a notepad in hand.”
The cast list NBC released to media had next-to-no information that’s useful for a new cast like this, except they did include each person’s “self-declared superlative.” It not include what NBC gave to EW, such as the cast’s ages and their answers to three questions from casting:
- Why are you going to win The Traitors?
- Would you rather be a Faithful or a Traitor?
- What’s your strategy for this game?
#2 is the most-interesting question for me at this point, especially given a cast of people who don’t know each other.
It turns out that just four want to be Faithful, five if you count Mark, who wants to start as Faithful and be recruited as a Traitor.
So that means 17 out of 22 want to be Traitors on day one, and 18 out of 22 want to be Traitors during the game. That’s 82 percent of the cast.
As many of them point out, traitors are the main characters and have the most power and have the most fun—cloak and turret and Alan Cumming time and all that. Why not have fun and get more screen time?
Fame aside, I do think this illustrates a problem with the game: the Traitors have disproportionate especially since they will be replaced if they’re caught early on. Who wants to sit at the Roundtable and possibly be picked off by the traitors, knowing that even if they do catch a traitor, a new one will spawn?
Hopefully, the producers will add more of Mafia/Werewolf’s game mechanisms that give the Faithful more power, to this edition and to The Traitors: Reality Stars and Random Washed Up Actors Edition.
Here’s the cast and their ages, locations, and professions:
- Abbey Benjamin, 37, Mangham, Louisiana, nurse
- Abby Lee, 29, Saint Paul, Minn., astrophysicist
- Arisa Thomas, 36, Los Angeles, Calif., dog groomer
- Ben McDonnell, 34, Granbury, Texas, barrel racer
- Clyde Moser, 32, Charleston, S.C., teacher
- Jay Vinnedge, 36, Oklahoma City, Okla., physician
- Joe Vanella, 44, Wantagh, NY, funeral director
- Katie Fites, 23, Jacksonville, Fla., marketing manager
- Kim Daily, 37, Houston, Texas, lawyer
- Kriste Lewis, 52, Hattiesburg, Miss., realtor
- Logan Smith, 26, Gatlinburg, Tenn., realtor
- Madeline Kostopulos, 26, San Diego, Calif., construction manager
- Mark Zgoda, 26, Phillipsburg, N.J., personal trainer
- Michael Foote, 38, New York, NY, lawyer
- Morgan Cook, 30, Midland, Mich., content creator
- Niyyah Hayes, 29, Indianapolis, Indiana, therapist
- Shane Beatty, 32, Staten Island, N.Y., ironworker
- Sherry Kuehl, 65, Leawood, Kansas, writer
- Tomica Adams, 54, Boston, Mass., pilot
- Victor Vollbrechthausen, 26, New York, NY, business executive
- Wyatt Gillespie, 26, Ligonier, Pa., designer
- Xavier Scruggs, 38, Wesley Chapel, Fla., MLB analyst
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Andy Dehnart is a writer and teacher whose reporting and criticism has appeared on NPR and in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vulture, The Atlantic, Salon, Playboy, The Daily Beast, and other publications. Andy’s work on reality blurred has won an Excellence in Journalism award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists (2023) and an L.A. Press Club National A&E Journalism Award (2021), and was honored with Florida Society for Professional Journalists awards (2015, 2021, 2023). He’s president of the Television Critics Association, and a member of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and The Authors Guild. He holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing and literature from Bennington College, and his memoir-in-progress, I’m Here to Make Friends, was longlisted for the 2022 First Pages Prize.
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