Photo: Euan Cherry/PEACOCK
Eric Nam has no hard feelings. When I tell him I’m heartbroken, referring, of course, to his 11th-hour loss in The Traitors’s fourth-season finale, he goes, “Why?” and then laughs before remembering: “Oh, right.” Nam didn’t come into The Traitors as a canonical gamer — i.e., an alum of a competitive reality show like Survivor or Big Brother — but he tried to play the game like one. He looked for evidence, built alliances, and followed his hunches, and his strategy worked until Rob Rausch, Traitor extraordinaire, recruited him to the turret and threw his whole game out of whack. Eric, who never had any suspicion on him before, was suddenly facing interrogations from onetime allies like Kristen Kish and even Maura Higgins. When Eric, Rob, and Maura made it to the final roundtable, Rob turned on Eric, voting alongside Maura to get him out and robbing Eric of the opportunity to split the pot with his fellow Traitor.
To be clear, Eric’s not thrilled about what went down, but he’s chill about it now. His memories of being on The Traitors were that of sleep deprivation and mass confusion, but he’s proud of the way he played the game. “I know there’s the world of Traitors fans who are like, ‘You are the worst Traitor and such a bad player.’ I’m also just normal, you guys!” he insists. “There was a part of me that was looking back thinking: Should I have been really cutthroat? Should I have played a different game? I played as true to myself as I possibly could.”
Rob said he picked you because you’d been playing as a smart Faithful. Did you even have time to consider what kind of Traitor you’d want to be?
I wound up being a Traitor for three days. After 20-something days of being best friends with everyone, suddenly I have to go lie to everybody. It’s kind of an impossible situation to be in so late in the game. But Rob was smart. This didn’t make it to air, but when he recruited me he was like, “Hey, has anyone been talking about me?” And I was like, “Yeah, me!” In my head I was like, Colton, Natalie, Stephen, and Rob were always the leaders during the challenges. So subconsciously, once a day, every day, we were all looking to one of those four people to put our faith in. As the numbers dwindled, I started to feel like it was probably Rob, but I never had any hard evidence.
Going back to your question, I remember being like, I want to be the nicest, most benevolent Traitor ever. Doing this show was a big risk for me because you have no idea how you’re going to come off on reality TV. I didn’t want my introduction to the majority of America to be a conniving, backstabbing Traitor, even though that is the name of the game. [Laughs.]
Has your reaction to you being recruited changed between that night and now? I feel like being recruited to be a Traitor because you’re smart would initially feel like an honor, but that late in the game it could be more like, “This sucks.”
When I thought the Traitor was Johnny, I was like, I don’t think I can do this, because I thought Johnny was gonna die immediately. If it was just me left, what was I gonna do? I don’t know shit. When I saw Rob, I was like, This is going to be fun. He’s so under the radar and I think we can make a great team. Which, well, I thought we did. I was honored! If I were to ever do this again, I think I would be like, Okay, I want to be a Traitor from the get-go. I would play a completely different game. I don’t know if you ever played Mafia with your friends. My favorite rounds are round three or four because everybody has a sense of how people play and then you start to read into people’s personalities a little more and it becomes a real game of who can lie, who can act, and who’s treacherous. If I was making The Traitors, I’d keep bringing people back because people would play it differently every time.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen the U.K. Celebrity season that aired last year, but they’re all analyzing it based on the context in which they know each other — “You usually occupy this place in the world of celebrity, is that what you’re doing here?”
I haven’t. What’s interesting about their game is they play for charity, which is great because then they can leave everything in the game. With our version, some people are doing it for the money, some people are not. When everybody’s on the same page with the same stakes, it makes the gameplay more interesting.
Do you think you would have made it all the way to the end if you had stayed a Faithful? It felt like you were kind of the Rob of Faithfuls, where you were playing relatively under the radar but in a smart way.
Nobody had ever voted for me or brought my name up at the table until the very end. You only win as a Faithful if you can outlast. For me, it came down to being quiet, putting my head down, and searching for clues. I do think I could have made it to the end as a Faithful. Would I have won? I don’t know. Our Faithful brethren and sisters were, uh … not the best. [Laughs.]
Did working with Rob and seeing his thought process as a Traitor give you any indication as to how things would go down at the final roundtable when he wrote your name down?
No, to be frank, by that point in the game — you see it in both of our faces — we look exhausted. Emotionally, physically, and psychologically, I was so tired. By episode six or seven, I was like, Somebody kill me. Some people were literally sitting in their rooms all night writing down notes. Michael brought a notebook that he was scribbling in to the reunion. People were crying off-camera a lot. I was not willing to let this game do that to me, so I’m going to take my alliances at face value. Rob says this; I’m just going to trust him. I didn’t realize that he would do that to me, and I genuinely still don’t know what to say about why he voted me out, but … whatever.
Is that why you decided to vote for him in the final roundtable?
As soon as I saw him throw red, I was like, That’s how it’s going to go. Now it doesn’t matter. If they’re going to vote me out, I might as well give Maura a heads-up that she’s done. I wasn’t going to protect him to the end. It was game over.
But I did feel truly blindsided. The other reason I didn’t see this coming is because of what happened during the plushy-game challenge. If he or I did not win the shield, our entire plan was done. So when Rob went out that first round, I was like, “I got you. Watch this.” And we got it! I did him a very, very big solid. Again, for me, I’m a loyal person, so I just really didn’t see it coming.
Did you like the challenges?
I did. I know for a lot of people at home, they’re like, “These challenges are dumb and they’re really annoying to watch,” but it builds rapport with the players. It definitely played to Rob’s advantage because he was a physical player. Once a day, everybody’s looking at Rob for leadership and guidance. If he wasn’t picking up Maura, walking her up and down mountains and across rivers every day, I’m pretty sure that final would have been a different situation.
As you mentioned earlier, this is your big introduction to American audiences. How did you wind up deciding that this show should be the way to do it? You’ve done a bit of reality TV in Korea, right?
The team reached out through my agents at the top of last year, and my initial reaction was, I don’t think I can do this. I don’t want to. Reality TV in America is so different from Korea. Maybe it’s changed recently with the Netflix dating shows — it’s gotten a little bit wilder now that they have their version of Love Island. The thought of being on a show with really big personalities from Housewives to Survivor people was terrifying to me, because I don’t know that Korean reality TV sets out to make people look crazy or wild the way they do here. It’s a completely different DNA. It wasn’t until I had some calls with executives who were like, “We know you’re a great people person, and that would probably play to your strengths.” What really convinced me was their repetition of “This is a game. This is a game and you can use that as a crutch to make sure that everything is justified within the game.” My goal was like, Let’s stay on for two or three episodes and get murdered. I never thought I would be in it this way.
Did those feelings get carried over into the reunion? Were there any lingering hard feelings you had to work out?
It felt like going to a Housewives reunion. I mean, I’ve never seen one, but it’s what I imagine those would be like. A lot of people were just going at each other and I was turning to Andy Cohen going, “I think I should be watching Housewives because this is hilarious.”
Did you have any sense that either the “man with the magic ears” or Johnny’s handwriting were going to follow you out of the castle?
The Johnny of it all goes back to hunches. Your mind plays tricks on you. Everybody was so convinced it was Johnny, so I saw that handwriting, I was like, “Johnny has better handwriting than this, but I guarantee he probably sat on his left hand, made his hand numb, and wrote with his left hand in some weird crazy way so that it’s not detectable.” When that happened, people were like, “You’re so dumb.” I’m not dumb. I’m just in this insane game! Everybody there is like, “Hey, you winked or you flinched.
You dropped the fork, Rob, and that makes you a Traitor.”
How are things with Tiffany after the “man with the magic ears” incident?
There were moments where things got a little hairy on socials, but Tiffany and I are really good friends. I’m seeing her tonight. People just need to remember this is a game.
And she is a gamer!
Right, she knows! We’re good.
You had a hearty supply of sweaters on the show. How did you go about thinking about your wardrobe?
I wanted to go for a very approachable boy next door. Everybody’s used to working out and then going straight to work. Everything is athleisure and everybody looks like a slob. I miss the days of, I’m going to wear a nice collared shirt or a sweater.
I polled a handful of my Traitors-viewing friends about what they wanted to ask you about, and they all had the same question: What is his skin-care routine?
I had actually been developing a skin-care line for a while and I was hoping to get it out before The Traitors hit, but with the album and tour planning and some movies happening … one day, maybe. For me, it’s about diet. I’ve stopped drinking a lot. I don’t do dairy much. Otherwise I make sure I’m moisturized. I do a toner, a serum, a cream, and then I’m always wearing sunscreen. I have to give a big shout-out to the Korean skin-care gods because the Korean skin-care game is insane.