Maya Jama Breaks Silence on 'Celebrity Traitors' Finale: 'My Heart Was Jumping Out of My Chest'

Maya Jama survived five weeks as the only original Traitor in "The Celebrity Traitors" Season 2 before Michael Sheen exposed her at the final roundtable, she told Variety the day after the finale aired on BBC iPlayer. Her exit cleared the path for Faithfuls Romesh Ranganathan and Sebastian Croft, who each donated £41,500 ($55,600) to charity after voting out Traitor King Kenny.

Jama, the "Love Island" host, will match the winners' gesture. She said she will give what she would have won to Action for Children, a charity providing foster care and residential support for children and young people seeking asylum in the U.K. "Obviously, I would have loved to get to the [endgame], but the whole point is money going to charity at the end of the day," she told Variety.

"It was actually quite shocking for me too, I'm not gonna lie," Jama said of her undetected run, during which she recruited three hooded accomplices: comedian James Acaster, professor Hannah Fry and YouTuber King Kenny. "After every day I was like, 'How the fuck did I get away with that one? And why are you not looking at me?'"

What did the final roundtable feel like?

Jama watched the finale with friends the night before the interview, having filmed in May. "I remember feeling my heart jumping out of my chest at every moment," she said. She described the final roundtable as "a lot more heated in the moment, even more than it showed on the TV." The roundtables, she revealed, ran to an hour, sometimes 90 minutes, and once stretched to two hours.

Her parting shot — "Good luck, you're going to need it" — helped seal James Blunt's banishment from the endgame. "A little sprinkle sprinkle at the end," she said. "The game's wide open now so go fend for yourselves, everybody."

Where did the Traitors go wrong?

Jama pinpointed the decision to murder Michael Sheen as the turning point. After Acaster outed himself at the penultimate roundtable, Jama said she thought, "OK, I'm fucked. I'm going to have to clutch at every straw available at this point." She called the murder-in-plain-sight challenge — the Traitors spent at least half an hour trying to make fellow players yawn, with Jama focused on Jerry Hall — "a kamikaze mission." She admitted she did not expect them to complete it.

In hindsight, she believes the quieter Traitors became easy targets. "If I could go back in time, I probably would have thrown a few more theories out or maybe spoken a bit louder," she said, "but that could have backfired also."

How does she feel about Kenny's betrayal?

Kenny voted for Jama at the final roundtable, effectively ending her game. "I obviously love Kenny to bits," she said. "He didn't really have much of a choice, so it didn't hurt as much." She reasoned that if Kenny had protected her, he would have been finished — "even though he did end up being finished anyway."

The experience, filmed over three and a half weeks in a Scottish castle on roughly three to four hours of sleep a night, left Jama with lasting friendships. Kenny, Ranganathan, Croft and Fry attended her Halloween party, where she appeared as Olympic champion Mo Farah in a bald cap and Farah's actual Olympic outfit. "We're the most unlikely group ever, but it's a bond that you can't have with anybody else," she said. A cast group chat formed as players left, the only space the NDA-bound contestants could debrief.

Jama said the show reminded her "how resilient I am," and she even floated a career ambition after rappelling from a helicopter in the final challenge: "I was lowkey trying to appeal for a Bond role."