Alan Cumming has become an expert host on shows like The Killer Among Us and The Traitors, and he revealed the advice he gave to good friend Parker Posey amid her own reality TV hosting debut exclusively to Us Weekly.
“We talked before she left [for Italy] and she called me from there,” Cumming, 61, told Us about a conversation he had with Posey, 57, as she prepared for her hosting debut. “The stuff I said to her was, ‘Make sure you have a character.’”
It was announced in April that Posey will host Hulu’s The Mob, which has been described as having a Traitors-style competition format and being filmed in Italy.
“I think it sounds like what she’s doing, this is very similar to what I do in Traitors, which is not me,” he said of the character he plays as a host of the Peacock show. “It’s actually a character. So you just have to make sure you know who the character is. So then you can work out how you can get them to say all the stuff that you’ve got to say, but you have to have a character to begin with.”
Cumming added that it’s “really important to have good writers that understand the structure” of the show.
“I think, actually, we’re in a new era of these sorts of shows, because I think more people are having a sort of a more performance style host than just a personality host,” he continued. “So Parker will be amazing, I’m sure.”
On The Mob, a group of celebrities will be sent to a lavish Italian villa where they compete to win up to $250,000 in cash prizes. Every episode will feature the cast tackling mob movie-inspired jobs in order for them to survive.
While Cumming captured the hearts of fans with his eccentric persona on The Traitors, he is once again embracing a hosting role on Oxygen’s The Killer Among Us.
Throughout the first season, Cumming will narrate stories of devious deception in which the victims were killed by people within their own social circles.
Cumming told Us that he was drawn to the show because all of the featured stories have a good “twist.”
“I like this one because of the idea that we all know that somebody’s being murdered, but the thing is, we are seeing … the person in the course of the story being told because we know at the start that the killer is among us,” he said of the upcoming show. “So I just love that extra twist. It makes you pay more attention, and it makes you much more, sort of, analytical, I think. It’s also much more shocking because of that.”
The Killer Among Us premieres on Oxygen on Sunday, May 17, at 7 pm ET.
