She was forbidden from sharing her victory with anyone outside The Traitors NZ, but Anna Reeve couldn’t keep the secret from her hubby Jay.
“I was supposed to be home on a Thursday night, but the shoot went really late, so I didn’t get home until 5am on the Friday and there was clearly something in the air,” shares Anna, 37. “I was on this huge high, so I told Jay, but he was the only one I told.”
The Rock radio star, 40, recalls, “She was doing super-weird stuff, bouncing on the bed. Obviously, there was a whole lot of bottled-up excitement that couldn’t be released. I was very proud of her, but I always knew she would win.”
The couple’s twins, Hunter and Oscar, turned nine a couple of days after their mum returned from 10 days filming Traitors at a luxury lodge north of Auckland, but they found out Anna was a winner only when the finale aired on 5 September.
It’s the longest Anna’s been apart from Jay and sons Oscar (left) and Hunter.
“Keeping it quiet was really tough,” says Anna. “Once the advertising for the show started, my friends kept saying, ‘I bet you win,’ but I couldn’t say anything.”
The show’s production was so top secret that contestants were blindfolded and photographed individually for publicity pictures the day before filming started. The images were then Photoshopped together for a group shot.
“You can kind of tell because in those heels, I am about six foot, but in the photo, I am only slightly taller than Vanda [Symon], who’s about five foot!” laughs Anna.
“At the shoot, the producers were taking it very seriously, whispering to each other on radios as they moved us around and calling us by numbers instead of names, so we’d be surprised when we got to the lodge.”
Anna already knew fellow contestant Brooke Howard-Smith because his wife Amber Peebles, 40, was Jay’s co-host on MTV.
“And funnily enough, Dylan Reeve is Jay’s cousin, but I hadn’t seen him for a while. I’d also modelled with Colin [Mathura-Jeffree] for years and I knew Brodie [Kane], but we all became much closer on the show.”
Anna says the experience “really took a mental toll on us”.
Anna was surprised at how “the lines between game and reality got massively blurred” during filming. She remembers, “I came home and told Jay, ‘I cried too much!’ It was the lack of communication. When you’re not on camera, you’re not allowed to talk and, at night, you’re in your windowless room for 10 hours. Luckily, there was a psychologist on set 24/7 and she was used a lot because it really took a mental toll on us.”
Anna had printed photos of her family for comfort. “I’d been away for periods of time before, but we’d always FaceTime. Even with Jay, that was the longest time in our entire 13-year relationship that I had not spoken to him. We only got to send one text from the producer’s phone.”
On day six of the shoot, Anna says she was “starting to get a little emo”. She explains, “I was looking through my bag and I found a really beautiful letter that Jay had hidden. It was exactly what I needed to read. It said, ‘You’ve got this.’ It really warmed my little heart and helped me push through. It really was divine timing.”
