Chrishell Stause Has a Few ‘Traitors’ Regrets

Chrishell Stause is wearing a truly unique ensemble when we meet for coffee at Hotel Chelsea on a blistery January afternoon. Despite the frigid temperature, she’s outfitted in a purple-pink Zhivago minidress and blazer—with a twist. “It’s a mood outfit. It turns pink the warmer you are. The cooler you are is purple,” the realtor turned reality star tells me, twirling to show off the fit. “Bringing a little LA to New York.”

Apparently, you can take the girl out of Selling Sunset, but you can’t take the Selling Sunset out of the girl. Stause proves as much during her stint on Peacock’s Emmy-winning reality competition The Traitors, in which Alan Cumming asks a menagerie of reality television stars and notorious cultural figures to play an extended game of Mafia in his Scottish castle.

From the jump, it was clear that Stause would play the game on her terms. “It’s psychological warfare,” she says. “I think it’s easy to watch the show from the sidelines and say everything you would’ve done. It is a lot harder being in the house.”

But on Thursday, Stause’s battle came to an end when she was chosen by traitors Danielle Reyes and Carolyn Wiger to be murdered. Befitting her roots on Selling Sunset—the soapy Netflix hit where she’s starred for eight seasons—Stause’s exit was appropriately dramatic. Instead of learning of her fate by reading a letter, she was murdered by Reyes and Wiger face to face.

“It’s a juicy murder. I’m glad I went out the way I did,” Stause tells me a few weeks after our coffee chat. Did she suspect Reyes and Wiger were traitors hiding in plain sight? “With Danielle, I was mad because I was like, ‘Oh, I freaking knew it,’” she says. “And then Carolyn, I was blown away. I had no idea Carolyn was a traitor.”

The writing was, perhaps, on the wall for Stause when she snatched her hand out of a box full of creepy crawlies in the prior episode, leaving her and her partner—Real Housewives of New Jersey star Dolores Catania—vulnerable for murder. While Stause has some regrets regarding her Traitors game play (more on that later), removing her hand from that box before anything was even put into it is not one of them. “For a billion dollars, it’s just not my thing,” she says. “I can’t do it. I’m such an arachnophobe. I made them swear up and down that there would be no spiders.”

Technically, there weren’t any—just giant millipedes, giant scorpions, cockroaches, and a robust dose of maggots. And to be fair to the producers, sniffing out untruths is a substantial part of playing The Traitors. As a non-gamer, Stause went into the castle thinking it might be fun to be a traitor—but quickly realized she wasn’t cut out for that job. “I think I would have faltered in having to stab people in the back that I was really close with,” she says. She’s also still haunted by her gut impulse to vote against Nikki Garcia—a member of her own alliance, the “Bambis”—in episode four. “I truly, genuinely feel so bad about that,” she says. “To this day, that was the hardest episode to watch.”

After spearheading the mob that voted out one of her faithful besties, Stause tells me she felt she “had PTSD.” That made it complex to choose between two more competitors during her last round table: Her unexpected ally who was clearly a traitor, Survivor’s Boston Rob, or the silent but innocuous Britney Haynes from Big Brother. “I couldn’t confidently vote for either of them. So I just thought, Who can I throw my vote to?” The answer, of course, was her number one enemy in the castle: Tom Sandoval.

At Hotel Chelsea, Stause makes clear that she still has deep disdain for Bravo’s chief villain. “He hasn’t got two brain cells to rub together…. He just is such a little weasel.” she says. When I point out that it feels like she came into the castle primed for beef with Sandoval, she politely pushes back. “I have to correct you on one thing. I actually didn’t come in like that,” she says. “I wasn’t excited to see him. I wasn’t sure if he knew I was friends with [his ex] Ariana [Madix] or not. So I kind of made mention of it, and I was like, ‘I hope that’s not going to be weird in the castle,’ and he was like, ‘Oh my God, of course not.’”