Richard E. Grant Blows His Cover on ‘Celebrity Traitors’ Minutes After Being Chosen

Well, that lasted about four minutes.

Richard E. Grant — the Oscar-nominated veteran of Withnail & I, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and a good four decades of British screen royalty — has just committed what might be the funniest self-inflicted wound in the history of The Celebrity Traitors. Seconds after being secretly chosen as one of this season’s Traitors, the 69-year-old actor walked into the bar, sat down with his fellow contestants, and straight-up told them he was a Traitor. On purpose? Not exactly. He just got a little too excited.

The second celebrity season of the BBC’s runaway hit returned on Thursday night (October 1), with Claudia Winkleman back in her tweed and turtlenecks, presiding over a brand-new flock of famous Faithfuls and secret saboteurs in the Scottish Highlands. During the premiere, Claudia quietly selected Richard and Love Island host Maya Jama as the first two Traitors of the season — the two people whose entire job is to lie through their teeth for the rest of the series.

Richard did not make it out of the first evening.

What actually happened at the bar

After the contestants wrapped up their first Round Table, the group drifted to the bar for drinks — the show’s unofficial confessional booth, where loose lips have sunk plenty of ships before. Comedian Joe Lycett, never one to let a quiet moment go to waste, started going around the group asking everyone point-blank whether they were playing as a Faithful or a Traitor.

Most people laughed it off. Richard E. Grant did not.

“A Traitor,” he said. Just like that. Flat. No wink, no build-up.

The room went silent. For a second nobody seemed to know what to do with it — and honestly, Richard kept talking, asking what the point of being in the game was if he wasn’t a Traitor, as though he’d just said something completely normal. It was the kind of response that sounds absurd until you remember this is Richard E. Grant, a man who has spent his whole career being gloriously, theatrically extra.

Some of the other celebrities clearly assumed he had to be joking. Jerry Hall — who has known Richard for decades and presumably knows exactly how dramatic he can be — was among those questioning whether he would actually give away that kind of information if it were really true. Fair point, honestly. Who confesses to being a Traitor forty-five minutes into the game?

Richard E. Grant, that’s who.

He knew it immediately

To his credit, the man owned it. In a confessional shortly after, Richard admitted the whole thing had been a complete accident — a mix of adrenaline, excitement, and what he called his “unguarded” moment. His exact words were brutally self-aware:

“Well that may be the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. I was so thrilled to have been 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. Oh, brother!”

There’s something genuinely endearing about the way he framed it. He wasn’t angry or defensive — just sheepish. He’d landed one of the most coveted roles in reality television and got so chuffed about it that he blew his own cover before the game had even properly started. It’s like buying a lottery ticket and then accidentally live-streaming the winning numbers.

Now, the question that’ll hang over the next few episodes is whether the other contestants actually believe him. In The Traitors, nobody ever really believes a direct confession — it’s too absurd, too obvious. And Jerry Hall’s reaction suggests at least some of the cast are treating it as a joke, or possibly a double-bluff. Could Richard spin this into a weird advantage? In a game built on misdirection, confessing on night one is either the dumbest move imaginable or a galaxy-brain fake-out. With this cast, honestly, it could go either way.

A premiere that pulled monster ratings

If Richard’s blunder was the talking point, the premiere itself was a genuine event. The season two launch pulled an average overnight audience of 8.9 million viewers in the UK — nearly three million more than the first celebrity season’s debut. For context, that’s an absolutely enormous number for British television in 2026. The show has quietly become one of the BBC’s biggest properties, and the celebrity spin-off is now appointment viewing.

The regular version of The Traitors, which started life as a Dutch format, has been a global phenomenon — and the UK celebrity edition, which debuted its first season to strong numbers, has only grown the franchise’s footprint. Season two being up by nearly three million viewers overnight suggests this thing is nowhere near its peak. Claudia Winkleman, with her deadpan delivery and increasingly iconic fringe, has become the undisputed queen of the whole operation.

The Celebrity Traitors airs Thursday and Friday nights on BBC One and BBC iPlayer, so there’s a fresh episode essentially every night this week. If Richard’s confession is anything to go by, this season is going to be unhinged from start to finish.

Meet the season two cast

Beyond Richard and Maya Jama — who now have the unenviable job of keeping their secret while everyone replays that bar scene in their heads — the season two lineup is stacked. The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey is in the mix, as is Michael Sheen, the Welsh acting legend who’s spent the last few years playing everyone from Tony Blair to Chris Tarrant with unnerving accuracy. Singer-songwriter James Blunt brings his own particular brand of chaotic energy, and former Little Mix star Leigh-Anne Pinnock rounds out the music contingent.

Joe Lycett, the man whose cheeky bar interrogation triggered the whole mess, is also competing. Model and actress Jerry Hall — who clearly wasn’t buying Richard’s story for a second — joins them, along with comedians Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan, actresses Julie Hesmondhalgh, Myha’la, and Sharon Rooney, journalist Amol Rajan, Strictly favorite Miranda Hart, comedian James Acaster, Heartstopper actor Sebastian Croft, Professor Hannah Fry, and EastEnders veteran Ross Kemp (sometimes credited on the lineup as “King Kenny”).

It’s a properly eclectic group — actors, comedians, musicians, a mathematician, and a soap hardman all locked in a castle together trying not to get “murdered.” This is why the show works. The casting is basically a dare.

A quick reminder of who Richard E. Grant is

For anyone who somehow only knows him as “that bloke who ruined his own Traitors game,” Richard E. Grant is one of the most distinctive actors of his generation. Born in what was then Swaziland (now Eswatini), he shot to fame with his feral, unforgettable performance as the title character in Withnail & I (1987) — a role that made him an instant cult icon. Since then he’s been everywhere: How to Get Ahead in Advertising, The Player, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Age of Innocence, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and a whole lot more.

In 2018, he finally got the recognition he’d long deserved: an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for playing Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, opposite Melissa McCarthy. He won the Independent Spirit Award for it and basically charmed the entire awards season with his open, giddy delight at being there — which, in hindsight, was probably a warning sign. The man cannot hide his excitement. Ever.

He’s also a celebrated memoirist — his book With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant is a beloved cult classic — and he’s been open about his personal life, including the death of his wife, dialect coach Joan Washington, in 2021. The fact that he’s now on reality television, gleefully throwing himself into a game of deception at 69, says everything about his appetite for a good time. He wasn’t going to sit at home. Of course he said yes to The Traitors. And of course he told everyone he was a Traitor within the hour.

What happens next

Here’s the thing about Richard’s confession: in the logic of The Traitors, it might not even matter. The game runs on paranoia, and paranoia has a way of protecting the guilty. The Faithfuls are already going to be suspicious of everyone — that’s the whole point — and a straight-up confession on night one is so bizarre that plenty of players will file it under “joke” or “strategy” rather than “fact.”

Maya Jama, meanwhile, is sitting there as the other Traitor, presumably watching her co-conspirator detonate himself in real time and thinking about her life choices. Their dynamic could be genuinely fascinating television. Can they still work together? Can Richard lie convincingly after that? Or will the Faithfuls do the Traitors’ job for them by arguing themselves in circles?

The Round Tables this season are going to be electric. Claudia Winkleman’s face when this all gets rehashed at the table — that alone is worth tuning in for. And with new episodes landing Thursday and Friday nights on BBC One and BBC iPlayer, we don’t have long to wait to find out whether Richard E. Grant’s moment of honesty was the beginning of the end or the start of the greatest bluff in the show’s history.

Either way, television gold. Oh, brother, indeed.

Source: Just Jared