Traitors Ireland Season 2 Filming Wraps at Slane!

The second season of Ireland is wrapped and on track for a September release, with a third series already in the pipeline, its producer has confirmed – but don’t expect another Paudie among the contestants.

And the founder of the production company behind the Irish version has also revealed his preferences for the ‘inevitable’ celebrity version.

The global smash game show – in which players try to establish who among them are ‘murdering’ other contestants each night – was a runaway success in its first Irish iteration last autumn.

It made household names of some contestants overnight, including retired prison guard Paudie Moloney, who rode his newfound fame all the way to the final of earlier this year.

Darren Smith, founder and managing director of Traitors Ireland producers, Kite Entertainment, said viewers can look forward to the return of the wolfhounds prominent in the first season, ‘some brilliant costumes’ worn by presenter Siobhán McSweeney, and ‘a lot of great murders’. 

And while details of the new suite of players are kept under strict wraps until the series starts, he assured fans there are ‘a few that are going to land in the public’s hearts’.

He said producers ‘very deliberately haven’t gone like-for-like’ in selecting the new cast.

‘It’s not like we’ve gone for an older man to try and recreate another Paudie,’ he told the Irish Mail on Sunday.

‘I think the audience smells that stuff when you do it. It’s a very different energy to this cast. They’re just different players.’

Last year, Mr Smith told the MoS there had been around 4,000 applications for the first season, with the game already widely familiar to Irish audiences through British and US versions.

Some cast members were recruited out and about at events, including Faye Brennan, who was approached at the Ploughing Championships.

He estimated double the number of people – ‘eight or nine thousand’ – applied to be on this year’s version, again filmed at Slane Castle.

‘On this one it will be mainly application based, just because of the sheer volume of applications we had. When you have that, there’s less need to go out and about – but it is a mixture still,’ he said.

The BBC’s first celebrity version of Traitors last year was among its most popular, with big names such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Clare Balding all revealing new sides to their personalities.

Asked if an Irish celebrity version is on the horizon, Mr Smith said: ‘Not immediately. We’re contracted for a third season, but it’ll be civilians again.’

But he added: ‘I think it’s inevitable that some day we’ll do a celebrity one, but for now it’s still civilians.’

Asked who he’d like to see take part in an Irish celebrity edition, the TV exec paused before offering: ‘Jesus and the 12 apostles would be good.’

Mr Smith said a celebrity version would likely follow ‘the same model as the UK, where you go with a handful of big dogs, and by them doing it, it gives others permission to do it, if that makes sense’.

He continued: ‘I like the idea of the unlikely – a couple of people that you would be very surprised to hear are taking part. And I like the idea of people who are really big names, but kind of only in Ireland. So there’s not many of them.’

Shooting for season two is complete, but the producer said there is still ‘a huge amount of heavy lifting in the edit’, which will continue even after the first episode airs.

‘You’re talking about over 40 cameras shooting all day long, every day. So there’s a lot of material to crunch down.

The producer said the second season has been ‘a bit less frantic’ for Kite, who also make shows like Ireland’s Fittest Family and Gogglebox Ireland.

‘It’s never easy though,’ he stressed. ‘It’s a big show.’