Claudia Winkleman has teased a “truly extraordinary” twist for the upcoming fourth season of The Traitors.
The new series begins airing on BBC One at 8pm on January 1. There will be a total of 12 episodes, with the second instalment confirmed for the same time on January 2. Further episodes are expected to air each Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Now, ahead of its launch, Winkleman has suggested there will be a shake-up this time around.
“All I will say is there’s something new, and what happens in this series is truly extraordinary with moments that made me gasp,” she told BBC News.
“I can’t wait for people to see it,” Winkleman added. “The producers have the greatest minds on earth.”
It comes after a recent trailer hinted at a major change to the show’s format, showing a figure wearing a red cloak, rather than the usual green one worn by the traitors.
Some fans have speculated that the new cloak, which has not been seen in past series, could signify a new role that will be assigned to one of this year’s contestants.
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Although the meaning of the red cloak hasn’t been revealed, Winkleman has said that the next series “gets pretty twisty”.
“The people who create the show, they have to keep on changing it,” she explained. “And they tell me ideas, and I’m like, ‘Are you joking?’,” she added.
Winkleman went on to say that the confrontations between contestants are “hardcore” in this series. “We get some very juicy roundtables,” she said. “It gets very heated… it gets ugly.
“We’ve never seen it played like this brilliant cast play it. They play it in such an extraordinary way,” she added. “You think, I’ve seen this, it’s going to go down this route – and all I can say is it absolutely doesn’t.”
There have been three seasons so far of the standard version of the BBC reality show, in which a group of contestants are holed up in a Scottish highlands castle and attempt to identify which of them have been designated as ‘traitors’.
The traitors work together to try to eliminate the remaining contestants, or ‘faithfuls’, by ‘murdering’ them at night, while the faithfuls attempt to ‘banish’ the traitors during roundtable discussions. If any traitors remain at the end of the game, they keep the cash prize.
The spinoff show The Traitors: Uncloaked, hosted by comedian Ed Gamble, will return after each episode, with exclusive interviews with eliminated contestants and special guests.
It was also confirmed last month that the celebrity spinoff will be returning in 2026 for a second season. The season one finale, which wrapped up earlier this year, was described by some viewers as “perhaps the best piece of reality TV in years”.