Cody Calafiore won season 22 of Big Brother, so you’d expect him to have a major advantage on Peacock’s new reality show The Traitors, where 20 contestants — including 10 reality stars — have to manipulate and deceive each other to win the $250,000 grand prize. But Cody revealed to HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY that he had a much harder time trusting people on The Traitors, than he did on his two stints on Big Brother.
“It’s a completely different game,” Cody explained in our interview, ahead of the show’s Jan. 12 premiere. “Anyone can be a Traitor. Anyone can be a Faithful. On these other shows that we’ve been on, you form your relationships and form your alliances. Someone could trust you, but be a Traitor. So they’re ultimately not on your side. It has a different element to the game that I don’t know if Big Brother really prepares you for this.”
On the Peacock show, which is hosted by Alan Cumming, three contestants are randomly selected as “Traitors”, and they have to secretly “kill” the other contestants, known as the “Faithfuls”, one by one, without being discovered. If any of the Traitors get to the end, they take home the grand prize instead of the Faithfuls.
“You can like somebody a lot, but you couldn’t fully trust anybody,” Cody additionally said about The Traitors. “On Big Brother, there were people that I was like, ‘I fully trust you. My game will live and die with you.’ On this, you’re like, ‘I trust you as much as I possibly could, but I don’t fully trust you.’ So it’s crazy. The mind games that that plays on you are brutal.”
The Traitors cast includes a crop of reality show contestants like Cody’s fellow Big Brother winner Rachel Reilly, Cirie Fields and Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick from Survivor, and Brandi Glanville of The Real Housewives. A lot of the celebrity contestants knew each other before the game, but Cody said that wasn’t much of an advantage.
“I didn’t know Cirie and Stephenie but I really bonded with them immediately. And we really were close,” the New Jersey native explained. “But there’s alway that element of, I really like them, and I trust them, but they may be a Traitor. And not because they want to be, it’s because the game chose them.”
All 10 episodes of The Traitors drop on Peacock January 12.