‘The Traitors’ Casting Team Talks Finding Liars, Manipulators & Gullibles

The Traitors has been one of the breakout unscripted hits of the year. But while many viewers of the Peacock series will have been aware of its cast of celebrity reality faces including The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Brandi Glanville, Survivor’s Cirie Fields and Below Deck’s Kate Chastain, the team behind the series also needed a group of willing civilian contestants.

Enter the casting directors — Erin Tomasello, Jazzy Collins, Moira Paris and Holly Osifat — who were tasked with finding folk from all walks of life.

“We wanted to find people that are good at lying, people that are good at manipulation and maybe some people that are really gullible that will fall for it,” Tomasello said during a panel featuring all four casting directors at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees awards-season event. “Our first brainstorm was what job titles do people hold that maybe emulate that. Is it a retired judge or lawyer or a preschool teacher. That was the starting point for us.”

The civilian cast included emergency-room nurse Amanda Clark; Andie Vanacore, who works in music streaming; retired Army veteran Christian De La Torre; actress Geraldine Moreno; DMV office manager Michael Davidson; and political analyst Quentin Jiles.

Where did they find these people?

Collins said diversity was a big driver for her, so she scoured the country looking for new faces. “Let me look for a mathematician that is a Black woman, When people think of a mathematician, they’re going to think of someone that’s incredibly smart and very logical, but they might actually be incredibly gullible. So, you want to have that mishmash of types of people like Quentin, who’s one of those people that are very much like a politician. He’s a great speaker. But at the end of the day, when you watch back, you realize how gullible [he was] and how funny it was to watch because you expected him to act one way and ended up doing something completely different.”

TikTok was a great resource for the team, particularly Osifat, who found Geraldine through the social media site.

“TikTok was the best thing ever because you can see their personality, you can see the way they tell a story. Some of the things that they may embellish on a TikTok story is really telling of what they’re going to be like on a show,” Osifat said.

The Traitors, which was hosted by Alan Cumming, was produced by All3Media’s Studio Lambert and has been renewed for a second season.

Check out the panel video above.

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