‘I think I was relatively astute in The Traitors!’ Nick Mohammed on magic, TV mayhem and why he turned on Joe Marler

When I catch up with Nick Mohammed, he is on the set of War, a new HBO series. Full of legal eagles, tech-bro hot shots and ugly divorces, it’s a punchy, slick enterprise, nothing at all like The Celebrity Traitors - except for the high drama, unbearable tension and the fact that Mohammed is reunited with Celia Imrie. Traitors was filmed in April and May and this started in September, so they both knew exactly what had happened in the castle, but were still in their chamber of deadly secrecy. Mainly, Mohammed was happy just to kick about with Imrie again. “She’s wonderful,” he says. “Everything you think she might be, she absolutely is - she’s just brilliant.” ‘If Stephen Fry was doing it, who was I to say no?’ … Nick Mohammed.Photograph: Mike Marsland/WireImage Breakfast of not-quite-champions … Mohammed in The Celebrity Traitors.Photograph: Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert ‘I like having to win people over’ … Mohammed in his 2018 Edinburgh Fringe show, Mr Swallow and the Vanishing Elephant.Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian Which brings us to the root of the problem, the answer to the question: “What the hell happened, Nick?” Spoiler alert: we intend to talk about exactly what went down in the most infuriating Traitors final since, well, the last non-celebrity Traitors. If Joe Marler had had his way, he and Nick would have sauntered to victory, Alan Carr’s magisterial fibbing finally unmasked. Instead, Nick’s niggling doubts brought down the ship. Mohammed defends himself stoutly: “I think I was relatively astute during it,” he says. “But when it came to Joe, during those last two or three days, I became convinced I was being played. All of him saying, ‘I want it to be just you and me in the final’ - maybe that was him trying to string me along because he was a traitor and he wanted to win. And then everything becomes confirmation bias.” Whatever the reason, he’s such a lovely guy that I’m just amazed he didn’t try voting himself out rather than upsetting anyone else. Mohammed and Marler have just had a post-Traitors reunion on the Gogglebox Stand Up to Cancer episode, which must surely have been a tiny bit awkward, what with the betrayal of the year hanging in the air. “No, he definitely wasn’t annoyed. You know what he’s like ...” (Weirdly, we actually do - few of the faithful could have felt more authentically themselves than Joe Marler.) “He said, ‘It’s just a game, innit?’ Obviously he was shocked at the time, but within minutes, as soon as I got outside the castle and we had a drink together, it was all fine.” Before this year, Nick Mohammed had never been on TV as himself before. “ I’ve done Taskmaster , but even that was dressed as Dracula. I always have to hide behind something.” That was partly because he wants to act, so has to think about preserving the mystery, “without sounding too pretentious”. But he adored regular Traitors so...

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