Paul Henry returns as master of ceremonies for the second season of The Traitors NZ, explaining that, “Even though in my heart of hearts I just want to be retired … a little part of me would have died inside if someone else was asked to do it.” This season cleaves closer to the original international format in that there are no celebrities in the new cast of 22.
Well, okay, 22-year-old actor Ben Porter was briefly in Shortland Street, Australian-based MMA fighter Janay Harding has a professional track record and 32-year-old Brittany Cunningham makes glamour-mum content for 430,000 TikTok followers, so let’s just say no commercial radio hosts.
Everyone else has a normal job. Actually, that’s not true, either. Mark Mockridge, 32, is a gamemaster who makes RPG (role-playing game) content and teaches strategy and tactics for social deduction games (The Traitors is a social deduction game), Jackie Pope is a clairvoyant, Samoan Australian Joe Fa’agase is another content creator and 22-year-old Noel Calamas (New York/Invercargill) is a writer, which is notoriously not a real job.
But there’s a marketing executive who’s also a wrestler, a data administrator who does children’s theatre and Terry from Invercargill, a NZ Post account administrator who moonlights as a comedian. Mike the builder appears to be just a builder.
“I love that they’re all everyday New Zealanders and we say everyday New Zealanders like they’re somehow inferior to celebrities – of course they’re not,” says Henry in the publicity material for the show.
“Your range of everyday New Zealanders are just as interesting, just as exciting, just as varied, just as dynamic as anyone else, but there aren’t preconceptions about them and they don’t have preconceptions about each other, so the audience will live this game with them in a much more realistic way.”
Fun fact: this season’s venue, Castle Claremont near Timaru, comes with its own chapel and spent much of last century as home to a silent order of Catholics.
The Traitors NZ, Three, Monday and Tuesdays, 7pm, from July 1; streaming ThreeNow
