Ross Kemp on Celebrity Traitors: How he's trained to spot a liar
The second season of The Celebrity Traitors – the celebrity spin-off of The Traitors – features an impressive, star-studded line-up. The 21-strong cast includes actors Bella Ramsey, Michael Sheen and Richard E. Grant, singer-songwriter James Blunt, comedian Romesh Ranganathan and presenter Maya Jama, among others.
But one contestant Crime+Investigation is particularly intrigued by is Ross Kemp. While he’s best known for his role as Grant Mitchell in the soap opera EastEnders, there’s far more to Kemp than Albert Square.
He has built a significant second career as a journalist and documentary presenter, tackling some of the most challenging subjects on television – including Ross Kemp: Lost Boys, Deadly Men. Here’s why those experiences give him a perspective that few of his fellow contestants can match, and could make him a formidable force when it comes to finding the lying Traitors.
Who is Ross Kemp?
Ross Kemp is an actor, reporter, presenter and author who has played Grant Mitchell in EastEnders on and off since 1990.
But beyond the soap, he is perhaps best known for Ross Kemp on Gangs – an award-winning documentary series that ran from June 2006 to January 2009, taking him into some of the world's most dangerous criminal environments. The series won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 2007.
More recently, Kemp worked with Crime+Investigation to produce Ross Kemp: Lost Boys, Deadly Men, a series exploring what turned seemingly normal young boys into killers.
How could Ross Kemp spot the Traitors?
Independent thinking
Being an independent thinker is an invaluable trait for those in the Faithful faction. It is very easy to fall into herd mentality in the high-pressure situations that The Celebrity Traitors creates. When accusations start flying, group thinking can become fixated on a single suspect regardless of the evidence – and that is precisely how the Traitors win.
In Ross Kemp: Lost Boys, Deadly Men, Kemp demonstrated a striking capacity to resist exactly this kind of bias. During an episode of The Rest is Entertainment
Hyde said: 'Rather than say, "we won't use that because unfortunately we've gone quite a long way here", he completely unpicks the whole thing in the moment and says, "okay, well, I'm just changing my preconceptions completely."'
She went on to reflect on what this might mean for his performance in the castle: 'That is someone who actually might play the game well… you think it's this person, it's this person, and you can't get off it, or you don't look at the right people… To see him do that in the moment, which is very unusual for a documentary maker these days, I think that shows he's quite a sort of independent thinker.'
Documentary experience
Alongside this capacity for independent thinking, Kemp's years of experience interviewing people from violent and dangerous backgrounds could prove equally valuable. Over the course of his documentary career, he has spoken to gang leaders, prison inmates, war criminals and even pirates – situations that require careful reading of people under extreme pressure.
To operate effectively in those environments, Kemp has had to develop a specific set of skills: de-escalation, navigating volatile conversations, and detecting tension before it surfaces. Spotting lies, inconsistencies and the gaps between what people say and what they mean is not incidental to that work – it is central to it. In the relatively controlled setting of a Scottish castle, those same abilities could be decisive.
If Kemp is one of the Faithful, his experience will likely prove crucial when it comes to identifying the Traitors. But if he is one of the Traitors himself, his fellow contestants may find him very difficult to read – capable of turning his detection skills inward and using them to manipulate, deflect and feign innocence with considerable conviction.
We can’t wait to see how Ross fares this autumn, and the whole Crime+Investigation team wishes him the very best of luck!
Get to know Ross better by watching Ross Kemp: Lost Boys, Deadly Men on Crime+Investigation – and for more on the stories behind our programming, sign up to the Crime+Investigation newsletter. Every week, you'll receive the latest articles, episodes and more from C+I delivered straight to your inbox.
