New role in nest of treacherous traitors
HIS latest movie role saw him playing a schoolboy imposter who hoodwinked his teachers and classmates.
Now Alan Cumming is set to test his skills for spinning a yarn even further by hosting a new reality TV show – set in a Highland castle – for viewers in the UK and America.
Made by the team behind Naked Attraction and Gogglebox, filming for The Traitors will begin in the summer, with contestants due to be selected next month.
The group will pit their wits against each other, but three of them are secret traitors.
Perthshire-born Cumming, who is now New York-based, was in Glasgow this month for the premiere of My Old School, in which he plays Brandon Lee, the 30-year-old failed medical student who went back to Bearsden Academy and fooled everyone into believing that he was a model teenage pupil.
Remaining tight-lipped about his new show, he said: ‘I don’t know much about it yet but I’ve said yes. I’m hosting it and I’ll be doing a selection of weird things.’
The project is inspired by a hit reality show in the Netherlands, De Verraders, translated as The Traitors, and will be produced by Studio Lambert Scotland, which is also responsible for Gogglebox, Naked Attraction, The Circle and Race Across the World.
The show, which will run on BBC1, involves players taking part in a series of team missions to be in the frame for a cash price.
Studio Lambert, which recently opened a studio in Inverness, has already produced a trailer for the show, revealing the Jacobite steam train from West Coast Railways en route to a castle and its dungeons.
The location is still a closely guarded secret but it is thought to be Cawdor Castle, in Invernessshire, which Cumming and fellow actor Miriam Margolyes visited last year during the making of their road trip series Lost in Scotland.