'Traitors España' puts athletes, actors and Cristina Cifuentes to play cluedo

Who is traitor and who is faithful?

Who can be trusted and who can stab you in the back?

The genre of confinement and coexistence

shows seeks how to reinvent itself to stay alive.

, whose eight chapters premiere this Friday on HBO Max, is one of those formats that proves that not everything was invented on television.

There are names more or less known among its participants, there is confinement, there is coexistence.

But the rules of the game, never better said, have changed.

Because these 18 contestants participate in a psychological challenge in which they will have to measure who they can trust and who they can't while forging alliances to survive eight days of confinement in a castle.

The idea of ​​the format, of Dutch origin and which has been awarded the Rose D'Or award for the best

and

program of 2022, is simple.

The participants receive a role at the beginning of the game and are divided between traitors and faithful.

The traitors meet every night to decide which innocent they will eliminate and not come down for breakfast the next day.

The faithful also have the option of getting rid of traitors if they detect who is showing a double face.

The game of betrayals and alliances is served, with the viewer as a luxury guest of the entire double-sided show.

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The production company Gestmusic looked at the original format, released in 2021 on the Dutch channel RTL4, and studied it thoroughly.

For this, the director Nia Sanjuán traveled to the Netherlands to witness the preparation of the second edition.

"We were caught that it is not a different thing, but it places you as a spectator in a very different point because you have all the information and you suffer for the traitor that they are about to catch and for the poor faithful that they are going to kill," explains the Producer Tinet Rubira.

"And then we saw that everyone had played this, in the camps they play

,

have played

and it is an idea that everyone has in their heads, very easy to explain" , continues the producer.

The contestants of 'Traitors España', upon arrival at the castle of Sigüenza.Luis Miguel Gonzalez

Among the 18 participants there is a lot of actor (Abril Zamora, Fernando Guillén Cuervo, Rubén Ochandiano, Adrián Pino, Anna Allen, Sandra Escacena…), a lot of athletes (Ray Zapata, Joana Pastrana, Jaime Nava, Jaime Astrain, Blanca Manchón…) and even some politician, like Cristina Cifuentes.

“We were looking for people used to pressure.

An elite athlete lives with competitiveness and concentration.

Also people who could be double-faced, an actor is used to getting into someone's skin and you don't know if they are in character or not.

And also people who at some point have used lies or half-truths to defend themselves”, says Rubira about the contestants.

“We gave them very little information.

It was difficult to find people who, in an act of faith, signed up for a

without knowing what they were going to find or who the other players were.

We wanted them to be gamers and charismatic”, adds Sanjuán.

For the gamer, the actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta, who acts as the game's narrator.

His name was not on the initial list, neither as a contestant nor as a presenter.

But when they began to contact actors in the

process , they repeated a question to the producers: "Have you not called Sergio?"

“It turns out that in Madrid his games to

are famous in which he acts as organizer and conductor, and he has organized games in Los Angeles with big names in Hollywood cinema.

The

of the presenter was done for us by the

itself , ”recalls Rubira.

Jaime Nava, Anna Allen and Apolonia Lapiedra, in a moment of the game.Luis Miguel Gonzalez

The castle of Sigüenza, Parador Nacional, hosts the Spanish edition of the game.

The program also takes advantage of the landscape possibilities and the locations around this enclave of Guadalajara.

“In the Netherlands, the game took place in a palace and the players went to sleep in a hotel at night.

We wanted to make the production in a place where the game could be filmed and the contestants and the team could sleep, an infrastructure capable of accommodating 80-90 people,” Rubira explains about the choice of location.

To ensure that the contestants arrived free of covid for the week of the game (the eight episodes were shot in nine days), they remained isolated in separate apartments for the five days before the start of recording, without seeing each other and without even going out to eat. .

They also had several substitute players in that same confinement in case any of them tested positive.

In fact, Rubira confesses, there were those who stayed at the door of participating due to covid.

Sergio Peris-Mencheta, in the lavender fields of Brihuega (Guadalajara).Luis Miguel Gonzalez

Platform 'Reality' vs.

generalist television

HBO was not the only one interested in getting hold of this format for its broadcast in Spain.

"There was a queue to buy it," says Tinet Rubira.

The platform went ahead but there were two other generalist televisions interested in it.

The fact that it was for HBO has conditioned the adaptation, both in terms of budget and duration (55-minute chapters, even less than its original version of about 70), the strict covid protocol that they had to follow and the selection of participants.

"If it had been for a generalist TV, we would have done a

more popular”, acknowledges the producer.

They have also sought to give the program a finish that is more similar to fiction, as Nia Sanjuán explains: “The presenter in other adaptations is more explicit in explaining the game, speaking to the camera and giving way to parts of the game.

We wanted to make

, with a narrator who comes from fiction and narrates the game off camera, he has a very aseptic role.

The visual approach and the tone is also more towards fiction, with a cinematographic patina”, she explains.

Another difference is that viewers will have all episodes available on HBO at once.

"We didn't know how it was going to be launched," acknowledges Sanjuán.

For this reason, the program is organized in a serial way, with a final event in each episode that leaves the viewer wanting to see how it is resolved.

And perhaps the main difference of the Spanish version with respect to others has been the one that has contributed the character of the players, where the picaresque and the Latin temper comes to light and it is common for the participants to have several conversations in parallel, live the discussions intensely or even hide information from the organization.

”In other countries, players respect the rules and do not consider going further.

There are script twists here right from the start.

Everything that we saw as improbable exceptions has happened”, says Rubira.

Sergio Peris-Mencheta, standing between Adrián Pino and Jaime Nava.Luis Miguel Gonzalez

In the nine days that the game lasted, they recorded about 1,000 hours that they had to reduce to eight hours of programming.

In order not to lose detail, they recorded with up to 30 simultaneous cameras, especially in outdoor games, and always with at least five or six cameras at the same time.

“The idea was to move away with the cameras so that it would be visually different and be less invasive.

It is not like

, where the cameras are on top, here they are with an operator but behind a column”, Sanjuán exemplifies.

When they met this Wednesday for the presentation of the program, many of the contestants still did not know who had won.

Who will make it to the end?

Poker champion Leo Margets, expert at cheating and hiding her game?

The rapper Skone, used to destroying his rival in cockfights with his words?

Adult film star Apolonia Lapiedra, used to pretending?

Or the journalist and

analyst Juan Sanguino?

And you, who would you trust more, a politician or an actor?

Prejudices and strategies come into play.

Place your bets.

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