The Traitors: New Blood — Full Cast, Premiere Recap and the Accomplice Twist
- New episodes air Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on NBC and stream the next day on Peacock. The premiere on 17 September was two episodes, 24 September is two more, there is no episode on 1 October, and from 8 October it is one a week until the finale on 19 November.
- NBC says it ordered 12 episodes. The schedule it has published fits 11. Either the finale is a double or another two-episode night is coming, and the network has not said which.
- Two rules changed for this season. Alan Cumming named fewer Traitors at the start than in previous years, and a new mechanic decides the remaining one. Separately, every banished Traitor now adds $15,000 to a pot that still tops out at $250,000.
- The ‘all-civilian’ label needs an asterisk. One player is a former Major League Baseball player who now works as a national broadcaster, and the castle keepers are the twin actors who played Fred and George Weasley.
The Traitors has moved to NBC, dropped the celebrities and filled the castle with 22 people who have never been on television. It also quietly changed two rules on the way — one of which reshapes the whole first act of the season.
Below: the full cast as the network itself lists them, the schedule including a gap in NBC’s own arithmetic, and then, behind a spoiler line, everything the two-hour premiere did.
When is The Traitors: New Blood on?
Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on NBC, streaming the next day on Peacock. It is not a Peacock original like the four celebrity seasons before it — this one goes out on broadcast first.
| Date | Episodes |
|---|---|
| Thu 17 Sep | 1 and 2, “A New Dawn Is Rising” and “I’m a Sweaty Boy” |
| Thu 24 Sep | 3 and 4, “The Traitors are Watching” and “The Death Parade” |
| Thu 1 Oct | No episode |
| Thu 8 Oct onwards | One a week, through to the finale on 19 November |
There is a number that does not add up here, and it is NBC’s. The network says it ordered a 12-episode season. Counting the Thursdays on its own published schedule — two on 17 September, two on 24 September, nothing on 1 October, then one each on the seven Thursdays from 8 October to 19 November — gives eleven. So either the finale is a double bill or one more two-episode night is coming. NBC has not said which, and this page is not going to guess.
Peacock carries all four previous US seasons plus The Traitors UK, which has always used an all-civilian cast. If you want a sense of how ordinary people play this game, that is the back catalogue to raid.
Who is in The Traitors: New Blood cast?
Twenty-two players, listed here with the hometowns and jobs NBC gives them.
| Player | Job and hometown |
|---|---|
| Abbey Benjamin | Nurse, from Mangham, LA |
| Abby Lee | Astrophysicist, from Saint Paul, MN |
| Arisa Thomas | Dog groomer, from Los Angeles, CA |
| Ben McDonnell | Barrel racer, from Granbury, TX |
| Clyde Moser | Teacher, from Charleston, SC |
| Jay Vinnedge | Physician, from Oklahoma City, OK |
| Joe Vanella | Funeral director, from Wantagh, NY |
| Katie Fites | Marketing manager, from Jacksonville, FL |
| Kim Daily | Lawyer, from Houston, TX |
| Kriste Lewis | Realtor, from Hattiesburg, MS |
| Logan Smith | Realtor, from Gatlinburg, TN |
| Madeline Kostopulos | Construction manager, from San Diego, CA |
| Mark Zgoda | Personal trainer, from Phillipsburg, NJ |
| Michael Foote | Lawyer, from New York, NY |
| Morgan Cook | Content creator, from Midland, MI |
| Niyyah Hayes | Therapist, from Indianapolis, IN |
| Shane Beatty | Ironworker, from Staten Island, NY |
| Sherry Kuehl | Writer, from Leawood, KS |
| Tomica Adams | Pilot, from Boston, MA |
| Victor Vollbrechthausen | Business executive, from New York, NY |
| Wyatt Gillespie | Designer, from Ligonier, PA |
| Xavier Scruggs | MLB analyst, from Wesley Chapel, FL |
Alan Cumming hosts, as he has since the first US season. The castle is Ardross Castle in Ross-shire, in the Scottish Highlands — the same building the UK version uses — and this season was shot there in May and June 2026.
How “all-civilian” is this cast, really?
Mostly, but not entirely, and the exceptions are worth knowing before you start.
Xavier Scruggs played in the major leagues. He was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals, reached the majors with them in 2014 and 2015, played for the Miami Marlins in 2016 and then in the Korean league. He has been an MLB analyst for ESPN since 2021, was on MLB Network from 2022 to 2026, and co-hosts a daily show on SiriusXM. NBC’s cast page lists his job as “MLB analyst”, which is accurate and also does a lot of work.
The castle keepers are famous too. Alongside Cumming and his dog Lala, NBC has brought in James and Oliver Phelps — Fred and George Weasley in the Harry Potter films — as castle keepers. They are staff, not players, so the competition itself is still civilians-only. But “all-civilian” describes the contestants, not the cast list.
For the version where everyone is famous on purpose, the British Celebrity Traitors returns on 1 October — our guide to watching that is here .
⚠️ Full spoilers from this point.
Everything below covers the two episodes that aired on 17 September: who is wearing the robes, who is already out, and how much is in the pot.
Who are the Traitors?
At the first gathering Alan Cumming tapped Joe Vanella and Tomica Adams on the shoulder — the funeral director from Wantagh and the pilot from Boston.
That is two, where previous seasons began with three. He told the group directly that one more would join them, and the way that happens is the season’s new invention.
How does the accomplice twist work?
The two Traitors choose two other players as accomplices, who are then put through a run of tests over roughly a day. One passes and gets the third robe. The other does not survive it.
Joe and Tomica chose Katie Fites and Xavier Scruggs — the youngest player in the castle and the former ballplayer. The reasoning, as the episode presents it, is coldly practical: one of them can strategise and one of them has access to a social group the Traitors otherwise cannot hear.
The mechanic matters because it changes who is lying and when. In every previous season the Traitors were fixed on night one and everyone else was genuinely Faithful. Here, two players spent the premiere doing the Traitors’ work without the protection — or the certainty — of being one.
Who was murdered and who was banished?
Two players left across the two episodes, by the two different routes the game provides.
Kim Daily was the first to go, killed off at the Traitors’ direction and carried out by the accomplices. She had been telling the castle she was a college basketball coach rather than a lawyer, and the recaps agree she was picked off for being too sharp to leave in play.
Madeline Kostopulos was voted out at the first Round Table. Kriste Lewis told the table that Madeline had said something that gave her away over the murder, Madeline denied it — “I am a Faithful” — and the table took Kriste’s word for it.
There is a sour detail in that sequence. Madeline had won one of the three shields earlier the same day. A shield stops you being murdered. It does not stop you being voted out, and she was voted out that night.
How much is in the pot?
$50,000, banked in the first mission.
Players went into the loch for three submerged crates worth $10,000 each, and the numbers inside them opened a captain’s safe holding the other $20,000. They finished before the clock ran out. Three shields went to Victor Vollbrechthausen, Abby Lee and Madeline Kostopulos, first come first served.
The ceiling is still $250,000, and this season adds a way to climb towards it that did not exist before: every Traitor the table banishes puts another $15,000 into the fund. It is a straightforward bribe to the Faithful — get it right and the prize grows — and it will matter most in the back half, when the remaining Traitors are hardest to catch.
What has actually changed from the celebrity seasons?
Four things, and only one of them is the casting.
| Celebrity seasons | New Blood |
|---|---|
| Peacock original | NBC on Thursdays, Peacock the next day |
| Three Traitors named at the start | Two named, the third decided by the accomplice tests |
| Prize pot built by missions alone | Missions, plus $15,000 for every Traitor banished |
| Players arrive knowing each other’s public reputations | Players arrive knowing nothing about anyone |
That last one is the quiet one. A celebrity season hands every player a ready-made read on everyone else before a word is spoken. Strip that out and the first Round Table has almost nothing to run on, which is exactly how Madeline went home on one person’s say-so.
For a weekly elimination show where the vote, not the scoreboard, does the deciding, our DWTS week-one piece is the same problem from the other direction.
The bottom line
Twenty of twenty-two are still in the castle. Three of them are lying, or soon will be — Joe Vanella and Tomica Adams for certain, and one of Katie or Xavier once the tests are done.
Episodes 3 and 4 go out back to back on Thursday 24 September, which is two more chances for the number above to drop. After that the season slows to one a week, and the pot starts doing the talking.
How we verified this
✅ The cast list is NBC’s own, field for field. Every name, hometown and occupation below is taken from the network’s official cast page rather than assembled from recaps, so the job titles are the ones the show itself is using.
🔴 NBC’s own pages contradict each other twice, and both contradictions are recorded here rather than smoothed over. The cast page says “After more than 80,000 people applied”; the season overview page says the 22 were “hand selected from a nationwide search resulting in more than 60,000 hopeful applicants.” Both sentences are live on nbc.com. Neither figure is stated as fact on this page.
🔴 The same network spells its own filming location three ways. One NBC page calls it “Andross Castle in the Ross-shire region of Scotland”, another writes “Castle Ardross”, a third writes “Ardross”. The castle is Ardross Castle, in the parish of Ardross in Ross-shire, and that is the spelling used here.
⚠️ One player’s name is inconsistent on NBC’s own site. The cast list gives “Niyyah Hayes”; a photo caption on the schedule page gives “Niyyah Bilal Hayes”. The cast-list form is used below because that is the page whose purpose is to name the cast.
✅ The episode count against the schedule is arithmetic, not a prediction. NBC states a 12-episode order and publishes two double bills, a skipped week, then one episode a week to a 19 November finale. Counting the Thursdays between those dates gives eleven slots. The gap is reported; no guess is offered about how it closes.
✅ Every premiere beat below is carried by at least two independent outlets, and the trade recaps were read against each other before anything was written down. Where one outlet added a judgment the others did not — a motive, a characterisation of someone’s honesty — the judgment was left out and only the action kept.
⚠️ One widely repeated claim was checked and rejected. A search result asserted that one of the players was among the Traitors Alan Cumming picked at the start. Three recaps of the premiere agree he was not; he was chosen later, and by someone else. It is described correctly below.