NEED TO KNOW
- The Traitors is back with a new host, Gretel Killeen, and a star-studded cast in 2026.
- Alvin Quah of MasterChef Australia fame was one of those stars who joined and was selected as a traitor.
- We speak with Alvin about his time on the show, what he learned about himself and how he felt about the betrayals and deceit.
- WARNING: Spoilers Ahead!
Alvin Quah admits that he came onto Traitors Australia wanting to be a Traitor.
“You have a much better time as a traitor,” Alvin tells me. “Until it wears you down.”
The MasterChef Australia favourite had one concern coming onto the show: surrounded by some of the biggest personalities in reality television, how long could he possibly survive as a Faithful?
“Give me some control,” he thought. And for a while, Alvin had it.
When Gretel Killeen first tapped his shoulder, it was a moment he said was just “so good.”
“I remember when she tapped me on my shoulder and all I wanted to do was just scream!” he laughs. “It was brilliant. I felt like a kid in the candy store.”
Alongside fellow Traitors Australian Survivor alumna Kirby Bentley and Bachelor’s Alex Nation, he was quietly working behind the scenes, flying under the radar while the Faithfuls tried to work out who was lying to their faces. But in the end, it wasn’t a Faithful who brought Alvin’s game to an end. It was one of his own.
After AJ correctly identified Alex as a Traitor — and worked out that Kirby and Alvin were also playing for the other side — he put Alex in an impossible position. With her own name already on the line, Alex was forced to decide whether to protect her fellow Traitors or sacrifice Alvin to save herself.
“At the time, I was really disappointed because I didn’t know the reasoning behind it,” Alvin tells me as we chat on the day after the episode of his banishment aired. “But now watching it, I think, ‘Oh my God, it all makes sense.’”
Alex, he says, had been “backed into a corner” and “it was self-preservation.” But that doesn’t mean Alvin wasn’t hoping for a little warning.
The Traitors had made a pact to communicate if they heard one another’s names being thrown around, he explains, and Alvin believes Alex could have told him what she was planning.
“At least give me a fighting chance.”
The unexpected toll of being a Traitor
At first, Alvin found being a Traitor easy. The contestants were strangers, after all. But as the days passed, that changed.
“I actually started liking them,” he says. “They’re friends and I’m straight up lying to their face. It was gut-wrenching.”
For Alvin, who had initially hoped to be chosen as a Traitor, that was the part of the game he hadn’t anticipated. Despite that, he says he tried to play the game as authentically as possible.
“I always wanted to do the show authentically. Sure, we are all playing a role, but what I’m grateful for is that I held my head up high and I didn’t have to completely step out of my comfort zone in terms of being the person that I am.”
And perhaps surprisingly, the place Alvin felt most comfortable was the Traitors’ conclave.
There, with their hoods down and away from the other contestants, he, Kirby and Alex could finally relax.
“It was like when you’re debriefing a bad work day,” he says. “We would laugh and we would decompress.”
They had been strangers at the beginning of the game, but quickly formed a genuine bond — one that made the eventual betrayal all the more complicated.
Alvin had connected with Kirby before the game had even begun, with the pair finding themselves on the outskirts of the group as the only MasterChef and Survivor contestants without an existing connection to the others.
“We found each other. We started talking and laughing and we bonded on a completely personal level.”
His friendship with Alex came later, in the conclave.
“But bond, gosh, bond we did,” he says. “We’d be in fits of laughter.”
Which is what made the end of their alliance sting.
But, as Alvin sees it now, that’s the nature of The Traitors.
The game asks people to do something completely at odds with what most of us want in life: to be noticed.
“Everyone’s fighting to be seen,” he says. “It’s such a twisted challenge when they tell you, ‘Okay, your job is not to be seen.’”
For Alvin, that tension — between belonging and betrayal, friendship and strategy — became the defining experience of his time on the show.
The moment everything came crashing down
In hindsight, Alvin can see the warning signs. After AJ raised Alex’s name, Alvin had told his fellow Traitors what he’d heard. Kirby took the information in her stride, but Alex had a very different reaction.
“Unfortunately for me, [she] had a breakdown at breakfast,” Alvin tells me. Watching her from across the room, he realised things were starting to unravel.
“It’s literally that moment,” he says. “You know when you sort of see this crash, and you can’t stop it?”
His only thought was: “Stop talking, please stop talking.”
Still, Alvin doesn’t believe Alex’s reaction was an act. If anything, he says, the two women were simply playing to their natural strengths.
“Kirby is the strategic one, and Alex is a feeler,” he says. “She feels things, and she’s very emotional about it.”
The betrayal may have ended Alvin’s game, but it also brought him the relief he didn’t know he needed.
After his banishment, he was taken to an interview room, where the weight of the game finally caught up with him.
“I just cried,” he admits. “I literally bawled my eyes out. It was just weighing me down.”
Despite being betrayed by one of his closest allies in the game, he has no regrets.
“I will forever be grateful for the opportunity,” he says.
“In a world where so many of us are desperate to be seen, I was given the strangest assignment of all: don’t be,” he wrote in a social post after the episode aired. “Because belonging isn’t the same as fitting in.”
“I came here to play. I leave knowing, more than ever, who I am.” Alvin wrote. And for the little boy who once wondered whether there would ever be a room where he could walk in and truly belong, Alvin has his answer.
“We found some pretty extraordinary rooms,” he wrote. “And one of them was a castle.”
Watch The Traitors Australia Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7.30pm on 10 or on-demand on 10Play.
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