The Traitors champion Harry Clark has said he suffered sleep deprivation due to the intense schedule on the show.
The 23-year-old took the £95,150 prize pot during the dramatic final of the BBC reality show after he deceived his friend Mollie Pearce into thinking he was a fellow faithful, when in reality he was a traitor.
Clark played as a traitor throughout the whole second series after putting in a request to host Claudia Winkleman to be selected for the role.
Speaking on the Tom Dean Medal Machine podcast, he said: “At the start of The Traitors, I would remind myself why I’m here every three or four days.
“By the end, I was reminding myself every five minutes why I’m here because it got so hard. Because we would never sleep.”
He the contestants could be filming for 16 to 18 hours a day with the whole cast before everyone went to bed.
It was only when the faithful contestants were back in their rooms that the traitors would go back out to the tower where they decided who would be “murdered” that night.
“So you just had to pretend you’re as tired as everyone else, but not more tired,” he said.
“And that’s why you see people deteriorate, because after a couple of weeks… it takes its toll not getting a proper night’s sleep.”
He added that the show “100%” looked after the contestants, adding: “It’s just a game, isn’t it. So that’s part and parcel of the game.”
The former British Army engineer also revealed that he chose not to watch the first series as he wanted to go into the show with no expectations or trying to copy a previous game plan.
He said his plan was to be himself and not overthink things before they happened as he felt that could cause a contestant to “go into a spiral”.
Winkleman has fronted two series of the game show which sees members of the public attempt to identify who among them are “faithfuls” and who are “traitors”, since it launched at the end of 2022.
After the contestants arrive, they can request to be a faithful or a traitor to the host.
Clark revealed that he had always wanted to be a traitor but feared he would not get the chance after “crumbling” in front of the “powerful” Winkleman.
“I’d met her and I was like, ‘Oh no, she’s going to think that he won’t be able to handle it’, because I just felt like I crumbled,” he said.
“Because she’s actually such a powerful woman. She was speaking to me and I was driving down into my chair.
“I was trying to speak to Claudia and I couldn’t. I was like, ‘What is going on?’ Because normally I could talk to anyone. But she was such a powerful character.”
He said that before the selection roundtable it was his “dream” to be a traitor, but he started to get cold feet when Winkleman began choosing people.
Clark said: “It’s a lot, the pressure and the intensity of that building up.
“And then she tapped me and it was like, ‘OK, now I need to do that. The game starts’.”
The Tom Dean Medal Machine podcast is available on Global Player.