ALISON BOSHOFF: How Did Rugby Star Joe Marler Become a Favorite in the Celebrity Traitors Final?

They say that heroes come in all sizes. Well, retired rugby star Joe Marler is surely a hero like no other.

He describes his man-mountain ­physique as ‘like a melted wheelie bin’ and, until recently, he was best known as a gonad-grabbing hard-man of the pitch, with a penchant for outlandish mullets, a giant beard and a fondness for sledging the opposition.

Not, you might think, an obviously ­loveable TV star.

But, thanks to prime-time exposure on The Celebrity Traitors, the former ­Harlequins and England prop, 35, has won millions of new fans. Whatever happens in Thursday night’s final, it’s Marler who is surely the nation’s winner.

His verbal battles with Traitor Jonathan Ross and priceless sceptical facialexpressions have launched thousands of TikTok memes – and boosted his Instagram ­following by 250,000. And his ‘zombie walk’ over a wobbly bridge in one of last week’s prize fund tasks was instantly iconic.

One of the biggest characters in sport, he prepared thoroughly for the Traitors gig. In an official pre-show interview he talked about revising for the show as if it was an exam, watching and rewatching previous series.

He said: ‘I’m a massive fanboy of The Traitors. Ever since getting the call I’ve been giddy because I want to play the game that I love the most. I want to be part of it and I want to know how it all works. I’m living out my dreams.’

In fact, although he’s not mentioned it, he actually has a lot of experience with the game that he ‘loves the most’ and knows exactly ‘how it works’.

It turns out the England rugby team were in the habit of playing a version of The Traitors while on tour. Their version, known as Werewolf, is a cult party game and actually forms the basis for The ­Traitors TV format, which was launched on Dutch TV in 2021.

(In Werewolf, there are two werewolves and the rest are villagers. The werewolves covertly ‘kill’ a villager during the ‘night phase’, then join the villagers to debate and vote to eliminate a suspect in the ‘day phase’. The game was devised by a ­psychology student at Moscow State ­University in 1986 and ­originally called Mafia.)

Marler revealed in the summer of 2024 that he had been playing it with the England team while they were on tour in New Zealand.

He said: ‘I heard [England ­footballer] Jude Bellingham talking about his “werewolf celebration”, which is based on the ­Traitors-style game they play in camp. We’ve been playing the same thing. There’s a killing every night and you’ve got to work out who the two werewolves are.’

He seems certain – having ­previously incorrectly identified actor Mark Bonnar as a Traitor – that Cat Burns and Alan Carr are the two remaining Traitors, which means that he has indeed solved the puzzle. But will he prevail on Thursday and win money for his chosen charity?

There will be no spoilers here. What’s certain is that Marler, an intensely competitive and complicated man, will have given it his all.

He declared at the outset: ‘I’m here to win it. As much as I love the show, I’m not here to just be like: “What a great experience.” ’

In his home town of Heathfield, Sussex, they are cheering him all the way.

A former pupil at ­Heathfield Community College, which he left at 17 to pursue rugby, Marler joked recently that he stayed in the town throughout his playing career because his wife Daisy simply refused to move ­anywhere else.

Today they live with their four young children – Pixie, Maggie, Felix and Jasper – just outside Heathfield in a home which boasts a large carved standing bear in the garden and a converted garage filled with weights so that Marler can train. It’s very basic and he jokes that it is spit and sawdust, minus the sawdust.

They have three dogs and an enormous tortoise. Marler ­originally wanted to buy one the size of a cereal bowl, but ­mistakenly bought a tortoise which grows to around two and a half feet across.

One pub-goer in Heathfield said Marler had joked he was going on the show to earn some money.

‘I think he’s outstanding in ­Traitors,’ he said. ‘He lives a ­normal life here in the village and is a really good chap. You bump into him in the pub and it’s clear he wants a quiet life. He’s a good egg.’

The local added: ‘We’re very pro Joe. He’s a wonderful person. He’s dealt with all the things that rugby has thrown at him. Now he needs to do something else, bless him. As he said, “I need to earn some money”.’

Marler is not going to make a fortune from the show itself. Celebrities are paid a flat fee of £40,000 for taking part.

However, there will surely be many opportunities opening up for him in light entertainment after the show.

Some five months ago, he signed with M+C Saatchi Talent, also home to TV presenters Laura Whitmore and Jamie Theakston, in a bid to turbocharge his route into showbiz. 

They have got him on to Celebrity Traitors and also secured a couple of appearances on Michael McIntyre’s hit ­Saturday night quiz show The Wheel. Marler was visibly moved when he helped a contestant scoop the jackpot, and it’s his heart-on-his-sleeve honesty that has now become something of a trademark.

Who knows what might come next for him?

Kirsty Powell from Heathfield and Waldron Parish Council, whose cousin is Marler’s best friend, said she thinks Traitors will launch him as a star outside of the world of rugby, which he retired from exactly a year ago.

‘He’s got a very likeable ­personality, a very strong ­personality but very likeable. He’s not offensive particularly, although he has caused trivial offences in the past, particularly in his professional career.’

That’s perhaps a generous way of putting it. Marler became ­infamous during his playing career for dishing out abuse both on the pitch and off it. 

One of the incidents – in which he made ­comments about the mother of an opposition flanker who was in hospital – saw him banned from the game for six weeks. His own wife called him an idiot and a moron after that.

He was also banned for calling Welsh player Samson Lee ‘gypsy boy’ and for grabbing rugby star Alun Wyn Jones’s groin mid-match. Marler complained that his problem was he always got caught.

But there was more to it than that. As he now ­recognises, some of the defiance was a reaction against the­ blazers-and-public-school culture of the sport which he was not a part of.

When he was first called up to the England squad, in what you either think an hilarious or rather juvenile act of provocation, he showed up with a Mohican and an advert for Jolly Hog sausages shaved into both sides of his head. 

England manager Martin Johnson greeted him with the words ‘Nice hair’ and then asked ‘Are you going to shave it off?’ To which Marler said ‘No,’ and that was that.

He said in a recent interview: ‘There was probably a little bit of anarchy against a traditional class that I hadn’t been brought up in, wasn’t comfortable with and didn’t know a lot about. A defence mechanism against not feeling like I belonged.

‘I thought, “Everyone goes to private school”, and in my head they looked down on me and sneered at me, so why don’t I amplify that by a thousand by dyeing every hair on my head and being this fake tough person that no one could get close to?’

Some of his pranks were ­reminiscent of the footballer Paul Gascoigne in his prime and, like Gazza, there was a sense that Marler was his own worst enemy at times.

Often he was funny, though. He once put off a kicker by wiggling his backside at him before he took a shot at goal.

Media appearances and ­interviews were a riot. In one, he spoke about a comeback as ­’getting back on the horse’ and ended up conducting the rest of the interview in character as a horse, which happened to have an Irish accent.

Appearing on the Jonathan Ross show after losing the 2019 World Cup final, Marler sang Adele’s Someone Like You. It brought the house down, even though some of the other celebrity guests had no idea who he was or what he was doing.

But alongside this ­clowning, there was also an extreme vulnerability to Marler, especially with regards to his mental health.

To his great credit, he has embraced his difficult experiences and tried to use them to help ­others, becoming a prominent mental health advocate.

He has described his struggles and low points in his 2020 memoir Loose Head (a reference to a name of his position on the pitch), 2021 Sky documentary Big Boys Don’t Cry, and on his Things People Do podcast, which he stopped recording last month.

He is also an ambassador for CALM, the charity which aims to cut the rate of male suicides in middle age.

It was in 2018 that he reached a terrifying low after a minor ­disagreement with his wife sparked violence. Daisy had ­criticised him for not swerving to avoid a squirrel on the road.

Marler said: ‘We got home and I just spiralled and lost control. I turned over the kitchen, punched in one of the doors. Then I got in the truck and drove off. I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing.

‘But it was a massive turning point because it was the most ashamed I’ve ever been. I didn’t recognise who I was any more.

‘After 30 minutes, I came back because I was running out on everything good in my life. Daisy was crying and I was worried she was scared, but we’ve spoken about it often since then. She says, “I was never scared of you. I was just upset and wondering who you were and what you were doing.”

‘She had no idea even during those times when she’d said, “Any danger of you actually being here, when you’re here?” I wasn’t engaging because I was stuck in this fog. I didn’t feel like I could tell her or anyone because I was in complete denial there was ­anything wrong with me.’

The Harlequins team doctor sent him to see a psychologist. Marler recalled: ‘I went and saw a psychologist called Humphrey and I was not comfortable doing it, even with someone called Humphrey, and I got there and what an incredibly lovely bloke he was.’

Therapy helped, cold water swimming helped, and anti­depressants helped. He told Men’s Health magazine in 2021 that he now recognised his ­triggers and regarded mental health as every bit as vital as physical health.

‘Work and sport and the other parts of your life are not separate: your psychology is your ­psychology. It’s all one thing. How can I possibly focus on using those specific psychological skills for sport if I’m suffering from depression and anxiety away from rugby?’ he said.

Now that Marler has retired from the sport and is without the camaraderie and structure of life as a professional sportsman, he has admitted that he fears being ‘lost’.

‘For the last 17 years I’ve been told where to be, what time to be there, what to wear. It’s all planned out for you and your job is to throw yourself into it. It’s something that pulls you back in when you’re feeling crap or going through a tough period. It stops your mind wandering.

‘It’s institutionalised me, so how do I create a life that gives me a purpose and something to get up for? A personal purpose that isn’t just providing for the family, ­raising the kids, trying to be a ­loving husband. If the next ­question is “Well, what is it?”, I haven’t got a f***ing clue yet.’

In another interview he ­admitted: ‘There is stuff at the back of my head that I have to suppress quite a lot about what the next 40 years look like.’

He has a role in England rugby, helping to advocate for welfare provisions for the players. There is a partnership with a padel ­tennis company. And then there is ­showbiz – a notoriously fickle business.

But there’s nobody in the world quite like Joe. And in an industry filled with the bland, perhaps being an absolute one-off will turn out to be his superpower.