The Traitors is a ruthless game, and Cameron Merchant found that out the hard way.
The MAFS star, 42, was brutally dumped from the Channel 10 show before even stepping foot in Castle Claremont when Shane Gould saved herself and sent him packing.
The savage twist left the contestants open-mouthed, but Cam tells New Idea that he wasn’t overly surprised when Shane, 69, selected him to be sent home.
“My heart sank, and my gut dropped straight away. I just had this feeling,” he tells us.
“I had this really bizarre feeling straight away that that’s what was gonna happen.”
However, Shane insisted that her choice was completely “random” and shared her devastation over having to send someone home, because she was determined to stay in the game herself.
“It was random. It was really random to pick someone. I was between a rock and a hard place, and it was a really difficult situation,” she tells New Idea.
“I was asked to pick someone to leave the game before we actually walked into the mansion. So, I just spun around. They didn’t show it. I went around three or four times, and then I just pointed, so it just happened to be Cam. So, it was random.”
“I was devastated. I thought, I can’t do this, and later I thought, well, these reality TV games, they are a social experiment, and we are put into moral dilemmas at different times of our lives, and I just saw that as another moral dilemma. I could have voted myself out. I could have said, look, I’ll go, I’ll leave the game.”
While you’d expect Cam to have been fuming at his Traitors journey being cut so short, he was surprisingly at peace with his exit, saying it meant he could go home for his son Ollie’s 5th birthday.
“I’ve got this silver lining mentality and everything happens for a reason,” he shared.
“I can’t control what I can’t control […] It was Ollie’s 5th birthday at the time, and I was going to miss it. And I remember thinking, ‘Cool. You know what? I’ve got something to go back for. I’m fine’.”
“So the silver lining is always there, and so when Shane took my key, I was like, ‘Cool’. So everyone was just so shattered and shocked, [but] I think that everyone was even more shocked by the way I was like, ‘Cool’.”
Cam admits he and Jules Robinson were forced to move their family holiday so he could go on the show, but says he was still “grateful” to appear on the show, adding, “It was fantastic. I did love it. And now I get to sit back and watch it.”
However, if, like me, you’ve watched the UK or US series of The Traitors, you might be sceptical about Cam’s departure, given people have a sneaky habit of reappearing later in the show.
So, is Cam actually going to make a secret return? He refused to confirm either way, but did admit that not even his friends believed his story about his timeline on the show.
“Friends called me, and they’re like, ‘Oh, mate, I’m seeing you everywhere’. And they’re like, you, ‘I believe that you win’,” he tells us.
“They’re like, ‘You win it. I know you win it’. ‘Why would you think that?’ I said, and [they said] ‘You told us this story, and I don’t believe it, but I reckon you do’. I’m like, ‘Yeah, mate, go with that then, go with that’.”
At the time, Shane felt the same way and was convinced that production was plotting for him to return later in the same.
“I thought, surely they wouldn’t have him come all this way, you know, put his life on hold and then banish him forever, not have a go at playing the game,” she tells us.
“I hoped that he would come back into the game.”
While Cam remains coy on his fate in season one, he didn’t rule out a potential season two return.
“There are definitely parts for me that were like, I wish I had a little bit longer [on the show]. I wish I got more experience of it. But there’s always a season two,” he cryptically says.
He did have a loose game plan for the show, insisting he only saw himself as a Faithful, adding that Tully Smyth immediately told him she felt “safe” with him when they first met on the show.
“I was like, ‘OK, well, I definitely can’t be a Traitor now’,” he says.
But isn’t his trustworthiness what would have made him a perfect Traitor?
“That’s exactly what I thought at one stage. But how long could I keep that facade up?” he tells us.
I’ll be taking his comments with a pinch of salt, but for now, our three Traitors have been chosen: Alvin, Kirby and Alex.
So, what does he think of the choices? Cam says he had his eye on Gamble Breaux as a Traitor, even before host Gretel Killeen made her selections!
“Gamble was brilliant,” he says. “She was sitting in the car next to me, and the fact that she couldn’t remember any of our names so often – I was like, we’ve told her our names like 6 or 7 times in the car the whole time, I was just thinking, is this a game already?”
“We were all introducing ourselves and all meeting each other for the 1st time, and I was like, is she playing this right now? Is she switched on playing this game now? And then I realised, I don’t think so.”
“She’s just wonderful Gamble, the person that she is, and that’s a part of her personality. But that’s what The Traitors makes you do. It makes you question everything, which is just such a mind twist for everyone.”
Cam also agrees it would have been interesting if one of the twins, Josh or Luke Packham, had been a Traitor, but is backing them all the way as Faithfuls.
“They always had somebody you can confide in,” he says of the twins.
“It would have been so interesting if one of them were a Traitor because then they would have to talk to each other and go, ‘Are you, no?’ And that just could have been really tricky.”
“But they’re good kids. Um, they were in my court the whole time and I think they were genuinely shattered that I was gone.”
He also jokes that both Josh and Luke’s tendency to get hot in the face would no doubt get them called out early as Traitors.
“When they get talked to, they just go red badly, really red. So they can’t hide anything,” he adds.
But I’m wondering: How did Cam learn that much from them in his brief stint on the show? Is he just friends with them off-camera, or does he have more action in the castle to come?
We will have to wait and see.
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