Warning: This article contains spoilers for season two, episode 11 of The Traitors Ireland.
RTÉ
RTÉ
FOR SOME PLAYERS who go on The Traitors, an early murder or banishment means the game is over for them before it’s barely even started. Then, at the other end, you have the players that get to experience all the twists and turns but are knocked out at the very last moment before the final.
This year, that was Kayleigh and Pete, who were the last players murdered and banished respectively ahead of the final episode tonight.
The two faithfuls had a big impact on this year’s game – Pete, for his influence over some other players and his dramatic fall from favour, and Kayleigh, for her straight-shooting approach and her rivalry with traitor Pauric O.
Keeping up that candidness in an interview with media outlets including The Journal today, Kayleigh joked that she’s not rooting for anyone in particular to win tonight, now that it can’t be her.
“Not that it doesn’t make any difference, but I just can’t get over the fact that I didn’t win. I’m just absolutely raging still,” she said lightheartedly.
“I had that money spent in my head, and now I can’t spend it. So, I’m just like, ‘What am I meant to do now? Just accept that somebody else won and be happy for them? I’m like, Absolutely not.
“If I have to give you a name, I’d say Diego. Why the hell not? One of them has to win it. So, Diego, yes, if it can’t be me,” she said.
Kayleigh with Ian and Anna at her last breakfast before being murdered RTÉ
RTÉ
When it came time for traitors Carla and Pauric to choose their final victim to murder, there weren’t many faithfuls left to choose from. Kayleigh got the short end of the stick and was ousted – but if she’d made it to the end, what would her strategy have been? Who would she have wanted to end the game with?
“Myself. Burn them all,” she laughed.
“I wanted all the money. I didn’t want to half it. I definitely didn’t want to split it in three or four. That would not have gone with my plan,” she said.
My plan was just to win all the money.
“I suppose, I don’t know if you can win the thing on your own, so I probably would have had to share it with somebody, reluctantly, but sure, yeah. I’ll pretend that I’m happy for the winners.”
Someone she’d rather not see win is Pauric O. “I was fit to kill him from episode one,” she recalled. When she found out he was a traitor, her reaction was that: “He can’t win, like literally for my sanity and for my mental health and everything – I was like, I just cannot see this bloke win.
“So, I’m going to be on edge all day today until I find out who actually skips away with money!”
What have staff and students at the school where she works as a teacher made of her time on the show?
“The nicest thing that the teachers have said to me was, ‘At least you’re the same person. At least that’s the Kayleigh that we get here in the staff room’,” she said.
“I was kind of looking at them going, ‘Who did you think you were going to get?’… People are kind of saying like on one hand that I’m quite direct, to the point, a little bit harsh – I could think of a worse word to call myself, but I won’t! – but, then they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re also yourself.’ So, it’s kind of like a backhanded compliment, but I’m just saying thank you to everything.
“And then the girls are hilarious. They’re asking me all day, every day, ‘Miss, are you on TikTok? Are you on TikTok?’ I’m just like, ‘Go away, get back to class.’ I’m not entertaining it really at all.”
Pete was banished at the roundtable after raising suspicions. RTÉ
RTÉ
Fellow faithful Pete held out a little longer, managing to make it to that night’s roundtable, but was swiftly banished after being accused of ‘confusing’ the game with gameplay moves that the other players found suspicious.
Like a fair few other cast members, Pete was suspicious of Carla, but kept gunning for other players instead – why?
He explained the thought process behind it was that the players were fairly sure Carla was a traitor, so the priority instead was to find her accomplice, instead of knocking out Carla and going back to square one if someone else was recruited as a traitor in her place.
“Now, you are hoping that maybe you’ll be recruited yourself and say, right, I can play this from a different angle,” he said.
“But I think that once you’re in there, you’re just trying to survive and get to the later stage of the game. And even that means bringing a bit of heat on yourself, you might go that bit longer in the game.”
He said that towards the end, it became very clear that people were playing as individuals rather than as a team.
“It’s not even trying to catch the traitor, it’s more or less trying to beat a faithful from like a faithful on a faithful. You need to outsmart them at the table like a traitor, which did occur towards the end,” he said.
Pete managed to stay in the game until the penultimate episode. RTÉ
RTÉ
Pete shared the story of a sad phone call that he received on the day he was entering the game. His mother – who didn’t know he was on The Traitors – told him that her sister, Pete’s aunt, had been in hospital for surgery on a brain tumour, but that the outcome wasn’t what they’d hoped for, and his aunt had only days or weeks left to live.
“I think that’s where the emotion and the cracks of confusion came in, because I think that I kept it at bay for so long,” he said.
“One day I was sitting in the car with DJ and Kayleigh, and I looked out the window – I think it was episode eight – and I just went, I’ve had enough, I want to go home to my wife, my son, check up on my mom, and see if my aunt’s still alive,” Pete recounted.
After a talk with the on-set psychiatrist, who Pete said gave him “phenomenal” support, he decided to stay in the game. “I think that the confusion and the emotions were at that point,” he said.
Pete’s aunt sadly passed away a few weeks later. “I know my aunt’s looking down, she’s probably going, ‘Come on, faithfuls. Get the win.’”