The roundtable, a war-of-words showdown that punctuates each episode of Peacock’s Emmy-winning murder-mystery competition series The Traitors, always gets the glory for the metaphorical carnage which makes the show so deliciously deranged. Each episode, celebrity competitors go for the jugular with their suspicions as to whether fellow stars are faithful to the group or duplicitously traitorous, sabotaging the rest.
But those who work on the series say there’s another crucial prong in any Traitor’s strategy for survival: breakfast. At the top of each day, competitors convene in the Scottish castle (which Emmy-winning host Alan Cumming cheekily claims as his own) to learn — over smoked salmon and hard-boiled eggs — who the Traitors “murdered” the night before. From the scenes’ staggered arrivals to the hushed theorizing to Cumming’s always-grand entrance, this breakfast has it all.
“Breakfast distills the format in a nutshell, because you have the Traitors lying when they know who was murdered, and you have the Faithfuls trying to talk through the clues of who the Traitors targeted and why,” says executive producer Rosie Franks. “It is the narrative reset for each episode, and the only time the whole cast is neatly packed into a room before the roundtable. It’s really important, because you can authentically go from having big dramatic confrontations to character-filled, meme-able moments.”
“It’s so nice to talk about breakfast and not the roundtable for once!” series director (and 2025 Emmy winner) Ben Archard says. “It is not the bridesmaid in this game. It is well and truly up there as a scene that matters so much to the show.”
From a production standpoint, it might just seem like the cast is settling in to talk and munch on food as they wake up. But at the beginning of a season, when all 20-plus cast members are assembled, half a dozen conversations can be happening at once in this scene. The Last Supper is an obvious visual allusion for the scenario, but owing to the number of players — nearly double Jesus’s disciples — the table has to be an L-shape to fit the room.
“Wherever you sit at that table, you can have someone in your eyeline,” art director Luke Fuller says. “So, you get lovely shots of them staring daggers at each other.”
Traitors and Faithfuls eat breakfast around the dining room’s L-shaped table.
To capture as much as he can, Archard has eight cameras fixed on the cast when the room is at maximum capacity. “Basically, I rob, borrow, beg and steal as many cameras as I can get my hands on so that I can have as much coverage across as many stories happening at that table as possible,” he says. “It’s probably safe to say there are at least four conversations going on simultaneously at breakfast — sometimes more.”
The more the conversations fight for audible supremacy in that room, the more work it is for the creative team to sift through footage to find the episode’s prevailing story. That’s where editor Patrick Owen (another 2025 Traitors Emmy winner) comes in. With the entire cast mic’d up, sometimes conversational audio is caught without corresponding video, or he’ll find silent reactions on players’ faces. “We spend countless hours scouring for little eye-flickers and mouth-twitches to complement what Ben gets,” he says. “That’s the great thing about breakfast: It’s busy enough and loud enough that the cast think they can talk about each other without them hearing it.”
To lure cast members into the familiar yet treacherous Traitors breakfast environment, they’re greeted each morning with enough food to feed an army, all curated to reflect the regal castle setting. “The intention was always to provide a sumptuous and decadent breakfast spread, to the point that it’s almost theatrically luxurious,” says Becky Grech, production manager in charge of breakfast at the castle.
On offer are fresh pastries, meats, cheeses, boiled eggs, bowls of smoked salmon, fruit platters, toast, jam, tea, coffee and juices — served with vintage crockery and teapots. “It’s as much about creating a mood as it is feeding people,” Grech says.
But the food is also a tool — for Traitors to evade detection and for Faithfuls to suss out snakes in the grass. In season four, we saw Traitor-on-Traitor backstabbing when Candiace Dillard Bassett tried to use eventual winner Rob Rausch’s innocent fumbling of a fork to expose him.
Smoked salmon is a hot commodity among the contestants.
“The food is there to be eaten, but the amount of choice on the table also gives the players something to focus on and play with while they lie and act,” Grech says. “In turn, that behavior will be scrutinized by the other players.”
Beyond the food, when Fuller and fellow art director Harriet Sharp dress the table, they’re inspired by the landscape right outside the castle. “We have thistles and moss and other natural elements,” Sharp says. “With peacocks on the property, we put some peacock feathers in there as well.”
They also lean into the prickly blend of celebration and mourning. “It almost has a wedding or party vibe, especially with the florals,” Fuller adds. “But it also has a touch of it being a wake. It brings in that uneasy feeling with autumnal colors you automatically associate with Halloween. We didn’t want bright spring and summer colors. They don’t work in that room or with the darker, sinister undertones of the show.”
But the art directors have to commit. The longer the competition’s cast members survive murder or banishment, the more a constant threat of deception worms its way into their better judgment — which means even minimal changes to the set can cause panic. Fuller and Sharp use photos to carefully ensure everything stays in its rightful place from day to day.
“It’s really impressive how much the cast picks up,” Sharp says. “If you change the most minor thing, like move a candle, they will question why it was moved. They will read into absolutely everything because they are so paranoid.”
That goes for unusual camera movements as well. Archard keeps his cameras fixed on the table, but one unit moves to capture Cumming’s daily entrance into breakfast, after which he addresses the previous night’s murder and teases the day’s challenge. His theatrical entrance completely hushes the room, aside from applause and gasps for Cumming’s stunning wardrobe. But Archard doesn’t want his preparation for that big moment to derail any juicy conversations.
“If they see that camera moving, and they get used to what it means, then they know maybe Alan is about to walk in,” he says. “So, I try to vary it a little to keep them on their toes.”
Upon arrival, Cumming makes a beeline for the portrait wall, where the cast’s framed photos hang as a grim reminder of their fragile lives in this game — many a red X will obliterate murdered or banished competitors. “The way the table is positioned, they are staring directly at the portrait wall, so it is a literal representation of their own mortality,” Franks says. “Who has been murdered? Who isn’t going to come down for breakfast? You are staring your own fate in the face.”
Cumming relishes his signature move: taking the murdered player’s portrait off the wall, delivering a callous eulogy and tossing it to the ground. But the portraits have to go back up, so Fuller and Sharp have tried to secure them for Cumming’s thrashings — with very little luck.
“Once the season starts, the only thing we do to that room is constantly mend the picture frames that Alan manages to smash every time,” Fuller says, laughing. “We have reinforced those frames with brackets so many times, and we thought we had cracked it last series, but he still finds a way to break them. We are keeping the frame industry alive.”
Despite so much going into it, breakfast is one of the shorter moments of the cast’s day. The goal is to make players feel crunched for time to learn as much as possible while everyone is captive in the room. “That gives it an inherent energy by nature of being shorter than other stuff we do, because they have to use their time wisely,” Archard says.
The staggered entries are strategically designed to keep the cast on a razor’s edge about who won’t be showing up. While Franks won’t divulge much about how entry lineups are decided — just in case future players are reading this — she did confirm one thing: “The knocking really is by the cast,” she says, referring to the clobbering on the door that grinds conversations to a halt and inspires theorizing about whether the strength of the knock could reveal who’s behind it.
Every piece of the breakfast is meticulously planned so that when cast members arrive, they aren’t pulled out of the moment by the production unfolding around them. It is immersive, intense and exhilarating. After season four, though, the cast had one complaint about this daily stress test — there was never enough smoked salmon. Luckily, Grech is on it for season five: “We will certainly be prepared and alert the local Scottish fishing community.”
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #8, 2026, under the title, "Muffins & Murrrrrder."
