Derrick Levasseur on Why He Came Out of Retirement for 'The Traitors'

Derrick Levasseur may have not won The Traitors like he did Big Brother back in 2014, but he walks away still feeling like he did.

"Without getting into the business side of Traitors, I won before I even left for Scotland. That's the way you got to remember it," he exclusively tells Men's Journal. "And so going out there, you're there and you're willing to play the game the way it's supposed to be played. And speaking with production beforehand, my interpretation of what they wanted from me was they wanted to see me catch a killer. And to a certain degree, that's what I did. I caught the person. I just didn't present the argument at trial that got the conviction. So I was happy with it. I know some people will be critical of it, but I leave the game content with what I did, and ultimately that's what really matters."

"It was such a positive experience," he adds. "It's funny that people are having a more positive response to my play on this show than when I won, which is crazy, but it just goes to show that people want to be entertained. Nobody cares who wins that money at the end. They're there for the journey, not the destination. And so it is something that I'm going to take going forward, because being myself, being more aggressive, not getting to the end, but having an impact on the show actually appears to be the better route."

The downfall of his game came when he made the move to go after ally and traitor Boston Rob Mariano, who didn't see it coming. "I knew Rob was a traitor after [he targeted] Bob The Drag Queen, I think Wes [Bergmann] did as well, but it was about numbers and I thought people were starting to catch onto it and we would have more numbers," Levasseur says. "If anything, I probably waited too long. I could've probably done it sooner when you still had people like Bob Harper there where I maybe could present this logical argument, and they would separate their personal feelings, and vote based on facts. By the time I made the move, there were people who were pretty ingrained with Rob and liked him as a person and didn't like Wes. So because of that, I think the rationale was, 'Hey, let's vote for Wes. Whether he is a faithful or a traitor, doesn't matter. We don't like him and then we can go for Rob tomorrow.' Unfortunately that was at my expense."

Bergmann didn't exactly help his own case. "Once people started saying he was aggressive and things like that, he didn't plan for that," Levasseur says. "And so he reacted pretty viscerally and ultimately, I think that's what really contributed to him going home. It wasn't necessarily what Rob said. It was more so what Wes said, and ultimately I think that's why he went."

"I was actually thinking, Wes, I hate you," he adds of that roundtable moment. "When he said, 'If you vote for me, now I'm coming for you.' I was like, it's over. It's over onto next week. Plan my obituary, it's over. I knew it was done because the reaction to that, what you saw on TV was exactly what it was in person. There was a gasp, but it was like an audible gasp of like, did he just say what I think he did? And I was like, oh, you just lost half the table, bro. And I mean, we only had half the table to begin with..."

It's easy to think about all the what-ifs. "It's extremely frustrating because you think about the variables, right? You think about if Carolyn [Wiger] and Danielle [Reyes] aren't fighting that night, right?" Levasseur explains. "Carolyn votes for Rob, now it's a tie, now it's me versus Rob again at a tiebreaker. I like my chances, but he's great too. So it would've been good to watch you think about Dolores [Catania] throwing away her vote, you little things like that, how it could have changed and then you got to take accountability yourself. I maybe could have been more vocal with Sam [Asghari] and Ivar [Mountbatten], but to be honest, they had mentioned it the night before, and we saw what happened when you told Ivar information. Wes told him, he went and ran to Rob, so it's a lose-lose. I felt like we had the numbers. I felt like logic would obviously win above all, but unfortunately, you're not playing with all gamers. You're playing with people who are on a lot of different shows and they're paid to be there because of the emotion that they bring to the table. So I think that was a factor that I didn't put into my equation."

Before he left the castle, Levasseur left ally Dylan Efron with some advice – his buddy Boston Rob is a traitor and Britney Haynes likely is too. The latter, of course, turned out not to be true, but he explains his rationale. "When Britney confronts me after the round table, I do think she's a traitor at that point," he says. "She's calling me out, she's guilt-tripping me after defending Rob and getting out one of our best faithful. And at that point, I already have let the traitors know that I'm onto 'em... My hope was that I would still be there the next day. And my question to myself was, how do I get Britney to go against Rob? She's not going to do it. How do I get it? How do you do it? You turn 'em against each other. So by calling her a traitor, if her name's on the chopping block as well, she's going to be more preoccupied defending herself rather than Rob. So the design was there, the implementation didn't work out."

He adds, "But I will say it did work out in the end, just not the way I planned. But listen, it was a strategic move. I knew Dylan was going to tell people, and my hope was that Britney's name would get out there in the next round table. If I was still there, she would have to vote with me against Rob. But worst case scenario, she went home. I love Britney, but at that point, because I thought her radar was off, if she went home as a faithful, I wasn't upset about it. It was fine because she wasn't with me."

He says Reyes was his No. 1 ally in the castle, though he found himself tied to Wes as well. "From a strategic perspective, it was probably Wes only because I knew if I was right, he couldn't be a traitor. So from an analytical perspective, I was like, oh, I've got to work with Wes," Levasseur says. "But Danielle, on a personal level, she was one of the first people to congratulate me after winning Big Brother. I never forgot that. And she's the best player to never win. So it's one of those things where I look up to her, I think she's a good person and we've had a lot of personal conversations over the years, and definitely she was struggling in there emotionally, as you can tell. That's real. And so there was a lot of times where I was with her talking to her, trying to help her out as best as I could, and so it lowered my guard. I almost felt like a Big Brother." 

Once he was banished, he learned Reyes was a traitor, which he had his suspicions about. "It wasn't only her moves, it was just her demeanor. It wasn't Danielle Reyes that I know. It wasn't the one person that I've known for 10 years, and there was something off," he explains. "And in a game like this, you're looking for subtleties. There's no overt thing that says, oh, they're a traitor. It's patterns of banishments and murders and the little subtleties that you pick up in their queues throughout the day. And it's tough because you have to develop a baseline on a person like who they are before they became a traitor. And unfortunately for me, I wasn't there before people being traitors. So there was no baseline."

That's not to say finding out Reyes was a traitor didn't sting. "I was definitely hurt by her for sure, in that moment. We were having a lot of personal conversations," he says. "We were having a lot of personal conversations off-camera, and you talk about things that don't make the show, but they allow you to trust that person a little bit more. And so my conversations with Danielle off-camera were much deeper than my conversations with Britney. And so emotionally, I was more hurt by it. But I was surprised that in spite of what I was doing to protect them, that's how it went. But it's a good move. It was the right move. Watching it back, she getting me out lowered Rob's guard and allowed her to get him. So fair play to her. But yeah, listen, I love them too. They're great and it's always going to hurt when it's one of your closest allies who got you out. But as far as it being personal for me, I hold no Ill will now. I can't say that for everybody else. I'm looking forward to the reunion. I will be sitting there eating my popcorn."

Regarding the experience as a whole, Levasseur says he "enjoyed it immensely," adding, "It's not only the game – I said this in a previous interview – it's how NBC, Peacock and Studio Lambert treat you as a person. We don't talk about it enough. The mental health aspect of these games, both while you're there and after, I'm still getting calls every week from Studio Lambert, [saying,] 'How are you?' This is the episode coming up this week. This is what you should anticipate. Here's what we're thinking. This is something you might want to think about. You don't understand how much that means to have that support after the fact. So because of that, it makes me more willing to do a show again, especially with them because of how they treated me on the show and after the show. That's a big component to it." 

He continues, "I was very apprehensive about doing another show. It took 10 years. There are other variables like duration, being able to talk to my kids, compensation while you're gone. All those things are factors. But having that type of support before, during and after is something that I think carries a lot of weight. And I think it's part of the reason you see so many reality people wanting to play Traitors now."

As for whether we'll ever see him back on reality TV, Levasseur tells MJ, "It would be something that I would consider, especially with the way this went, right, the positive outcome that came from as a positive experience. But it would have to be the right situation."

New episodes of The Traitors drop weekly on Thursdays at 6pm PT/9pm ET.