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‘Telling lies, How to Read People Like a Book’: Elnaaz Norouzi reveals it took six months of prep to become ‘mastermind’ of The Traitors

Actor Elnaaz Norouzi said that what she was able to achieve on The Traitors wasn't a fluke, and that she prepped hard for six months in order to play the game well.

Elnaaz Norouzi stole the show on The Traitors.

Actor Elnaaz Norouzi, whose performance as a ‘traitor’ on the Prime Video reality show The Traitors was praised by audiences, said that what she was able to do on the show wasn’t a fluke. In a video shared on her YouTube channel, Elnaaz revealed her ‘hack’ to performing well on the show, and said that she spent six month preparing for it. During this time, she read books on human psychology and watched hours upon hours of the show’s international versions. Elnaaz was chosen as a ‘traitor’ at the very start of the show, and was instructed to carry out ‘murders’ while avoiding being identified by her co-contestants.

The show’s format revolves around a group of ‘innocents’, who must strategise among themselves to identify who among them is a ‘traitor’, while also avoid being ‘murdered’ by them. Elnaaz successfully managed to fool her co-contestants into believing that she is unintelligent, and can barely understand Hindi, being a foreigner. When she was revealed to be a ‘traitor’, everybody on the show was shocked at how well they’d been deceived.

Also read – Anshula Kapoor reveals The Traitors left her with PTSD: ‘No amount of money should be okay to give you mental health triggers’

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In her video, she said, “This just doesn’t come from nowhere. Everything you do, you have to be well-read and well-prepared. Let me tell you about the books I specifically read for The Traitors. One of them is ‘How to Make Your Audience Fall in Love with You’, which is about acting. And then there’s ‘The Laws of Human Nature’, which was very important for me, and it gave me so many insights. It was so important for me to understand the other players. And then there’s ‘How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, Mastermind’, which is what a lot of you have been calling me. There were two more that I listened to, one of them is ‘Telling Lies’, and ‘How to Read People Like a Book’.”

Elnaaz continued, “It’s a little scary to learn these things, because, in real life, I don’t like to cheat anybody around me… But all of this really helped make my game strong. Everything needs preparation, everything needs a lot of hard work. If you get into something without knowing what you’re doing, without having studied it properly, you might just do well to a certain extent… It wasn’t about winning, it was about doing well on the show.”

The Traitors will air its finale this week. Elnaaz is working on a Hollywood project, Hotel Tehran, starring Zachary Levi and Liam Neeson. She is best known in India for playing a supporting role in Netflix’s Sacred Games. She also appeared in Gerard Butler’s Kandahar, and in the Apple TV+ show Tehran.

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