This story was originally published on February 25, 2026. We’re updating it now that the season four finale of The Traitors (US) has aired on Peacock.
Rob Rausch wants to talk about colors. His favorite, he shares, is seafoam green. Specifically, the shade of seafoam green used to paint water towers. Even more specifically, water-tower seafoam green at sunset, when the light hits it just right. The Alabama-born snake wrangler and breakout star of The Traitors’s fourth season is having his second breakfast of the day — buttermilk pancakes and, for fun, a chlorophyll water — at the Surfrider Hotel in Malibu, a formerly shoddy motel that has been renovated into the kind of place Los Angeles creative directors flock to when they’re in need of a staycation. Speaking of green, the chlorophyll water is a truly shocking hue, one usually reserved for sour-apple candy or toxic waste. Neither of us is sure what the benefits of chlorophyll are for humans, but Rausch is always down to try something new. “I like photosynthesis,” he says. “I wanna be a part of that.”
Paired with his husky-blue eyes, snake tattoos that coil around his toned shoulders, and what may be the world’s most perfect nose, Rausch’s dry sense of humor can easily be misinterpreted as the earnest thoughts of your friendly neighborhood himbo. But that served him well on this season of The Traitors, the Mafia-esque competition show hosted with campy flair by Alan Cumming. A Traitor since day one, Rausch basically ran the game this season, charming and disarming his way to the bitter end — with hardly any of his fellow contestants catching on.
The Traitors is usually a haven for reality stars and washed-up C-listers looking to make their next move, but Rausch had to be asked three separate times before he said “yes.” And over the past two months, he has become a superstar to people who love reality TV but can’t handle a 37-episode season of Love Island. In the first episode of The Traitors, he acknowledged the game was a new type of experience for him: “It’s weird to be wearing clothes. I haven’t made out with anybody yet.”
In 2023, he was cast as one of Love Island’s Casa Amor suitors, a group of sexy singles sent in during the middle of the season to tempt contestants away from their relationships. While he didn’t make it out of Casa, Rausch left enough of an impression that he was invited back as a full-fledged contestant the following season. When he returned, he found himself in a love triangle with his original match, Leah Kateb, and Andrea Carmona. Having to choose between the two women agonized him to the point that he infamously took off his microphone, jumped into the pool, and hid under an overhang out of sight of the cameras (a move he now calls “super-dumb”). Some fans saw him as a sensitive guy who was having a hard time processing his feelings; others saw him as the show’s villain, a man being reckless with women’s emotions.
After nearly making it to the finale with Daniela Ortiz-Rivera, the fifth match of his 30-day run on the show, he told Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper how he thought he was perceived: “Basically, I’m a toxic gaslighter, but I’m hot enough that it doesn’t matter.” While that characterization may get you called “toxic” on the Love Island sub-Reddit, it’s basically catnip to Traitors producers. Reeling from his tumultuous time in the villa, he didn’t really want to do another show, especially if there was going to be any drama. He kept brushing them off — he had never watched the show before — until one producer told him to think of The Traitors as just a game and to consider that he might even enjoy himself. “She was right,” he now concedes.
Our breakfast arrives — even though he ate scrambled eggs earlier, Rausch can’t resist digging into something else “yummy and delicious” — and the 27-year-old is impressed with the whipped cream topping his pancakes. In the Traitors castle, a typical day started with at least three hard-boiled eggs (he estimates he ate about 70 in his time on the show). At home, he’s not cooking for himself either: His self-proclaimed “toxic trait” is that he eats out for every meal, mostly at a sushi spot in Alabama where his regular order is a “Salmon Bacon Time!” roll. He reassures me that he is unconcerned about mercury poisoning.
Rausch keeps himself occupied with an annoyingly impressive array of hobbies. We know he plays chess thanks to a lesson for Lisa Rinna that doubled as a murder in plain sight in an early episode of The Traitors. He does “all the board sports” (wake, surf, skate, and snow), makes remote-control planes out of foam core, is passionate about photography, has a preference for watercolors over oil paints, plays piano, rides motorcycles, does woodworking, and if you catch him at karaoke, he’s got a pretty solid rendition of “Country Girl,” by Luke Bryan, that he can whip out. And of course, there are the snakes.
Growing up in Florence, Alabama, the third of four children, Rausch thought he wanted to be a wildlife photographer or a pilot or an engineer or a firefighter. He has always been obsessed with snakes — he says he caught his first at just 4 years old. In college, his best friend watched as Rausch hung out in a creek and caught 20 in one day and suggested he could make money doing it. Soon after, he launched Rausch Reptile Removal. Everything you needed to know about the business was right there in the name: If you had an unwanted snake in your house, you called Rausch and he would come retrieve it and relocate it far away. “But honestly,” he says, leaning in to share a secret about his wildlife-rescue philosophy, “if it was a harmless snake, I’d go to the end of their driveway and let it go. He’ll be happier in a familiar area.”
Snake wrangling, it turns out, is interesting enough to TikTok viewers that hundreds of thousands of them began following Rausch’s serpentine exploits on social media. It didn’t hurt that he was often shirtless. In 2020, a TikTok duo called the Cheeky Boyos were touring the country to film a video in every state and met up with Rausch. They asked him to move to L.A. with them to film their content. So Rausch dropped out of University of North Alabama, where he was getting a B.F.A. in photography, and joined his new friends out West. “I wanted to get out of Alabama,” he says, “and then once I got out, I just wanted to go back.” He spent about a year in L.A., then wound up back in Florence until he joined the cast of Love Island in Fiji.
When Rausch joined The Traitors in Scotland last summer, it didn’t take long for him to find his footing. Alongside fellow Traitors and Real Housewives alums Lisa Rinna and Candiace Dillard-Bassett, Rausch sowed chaos in the castle, murdering their Faithful counterparts and letting them tear one another apart at the Round Table. He gave the performance of a lifetime to the Faithfuls — nearly all of whom had crushes on him. Figure skater Johnny Weir might as well have been speaking for the group when he said, “He’s so hot I can’t even look at him.”
Rausch’s initial strategy was to lie low, until his star-making moment in the fifth episode. After hearing Michael Rapaport, the loudmouth actor and podcaster, call former Bachelor Colton Underwood “conniving and commiserating” over and over at the Round Table, he had to step in. “Commiseration means to feel sorry for someone,” an exasperated Rausch informed Rapaport. Rausch wasn’t trying to be a hero, but the atmosphere had gotten tense and someone had to provide some comic relief. “Everyone was getting really upset by what he was saying,” Rausch says, “and I’m like, Are we really gonna let this guy control our emotions? He’s just a crazy guy.”
From that point forward, Rausch was in charge. He made the conscious decision always to play as though he were a Faithful, even if it meant voting out his fellow Traitors. “I was fully ready to work as a team,” he says, but “as soon as I knew someone was too far gone, they were gone.” That level of cunning made Rausch the best player the show has seen since Cirie Fields, the iconic Survivor player and the only contestant ever to win the show as a Traitor.
Alone in his hotel room at night, Rausch would put his Traitor cap back on and get to scheming. Before going to sleep, he says, he would stay up “calculating probabilities of outcomes based on what might happen the next day.” Once he had a confident guess, he would use that information to work out how that could affect the game over the next three Round Table sessions. “I’d get to a point where I’d be like, Okay, this is really getting complicated,” he says. “And then I would just go to bed.”
While banning Faithfuls and catching snakes with his bare hands is light work, being in the public eye has been harder. “I don’t feel like I’m famous, but I do feel like everyone wants something from me,” Rausch says in between bites of pancakes — which he has now begun spearing into his mouth with a knife after dropping his fork on the floor. On a recent snowboarding trip with friends, Rausch got drunk for the first time since Dry January and started commenting on TikToks. In one video, a woman compared his emotional Love Island run to his more calculated gameplay on The Traitors, calling him “such a good gaslighter.” Lying in bed with a bit of liquid courage, Rausch typed out a lengthy defense. “I had an extremely emotional response to a situation that felt like the end of the world at the time bc let me tell you LI does something to your brain chemistry,” he wrote of his infamous pool moment. “Oddly enough having that crash out prepared me for this game bc once I finally got out I realized how much I was over reacting and [how] ridiculous it was.”
Replying to a TikTok about himself was out of character because, for the most part, he really does not care what other people think. Rausch was homeschooled by his mother for most of his childhood, an experience he says allowed him to develop his personality without much outside influence. He’s extremely confident but a little quiet, which he thinks people sometimes mistake for being a “fucking douchebag” or a “pretty boy, fuckboy, white boy.”
“I can just walk in any room and I just do not give a fuck. Like, genuinely, I don’t give a fuck,” he says. “But it’s not because I think I’m better than anyone or I think I’m so great. To me, it just doesn’t make sense to care what other people think.”
Unless it comes to his gameplay, which he can be “a little defensive about,” he admits. With “Love Island, it was so easy to just be like, They don’t fucking know me. Who cares?” But he would like a little credit for the performance he gave in the Traitors castle. “Like, I’m smart!” he says, throwing his head back and laughing, a hint of genuine indignation slipping through. Is it still gaslighting if he’s playing a game with other adults who signed up to play?
Rausch can’t deny he had a lot of fun with The Traitors, but he tells me he’s not itching to get back on TV. “I’ll probably do another show. It’s just so hard to say ‘no’ because, like, I don’t wanna look back ten years down the road and be like, Man, you could have set up your kids for college,” he says. At the same time, “a big part of me just wants to, like, fuck off.”
If he were to do that, there would still be enough on his plate. Between his brand deals and snake wrangling across the world in countries like Malta, Indonesia, and Vietnam, Rausch’s passion project is Creek Rat, a fashion brand he started with his sister Lily. They do all the creative work together, but she runs everything else and even moved back to Alabama to run the family business. Soon, they will launch a collaboration with Realtree, the camo brand once worn exclusively by hunters but made hip by Chappell Roan and Bushwick’s queer scene. Creek Rat will soon have another collab, with a shoe company Rausch is keeping under wraps, and drop a hoodie inspired by one he hand-sewed for himself a few years ago that was in turn inspired by one of his favorite movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Staring out at the Pacific, looking as beautiful as a seafoam-green water tower at sunset, Rausch tells me about his plans for the immediate future. He’s building his own home in Florence, not too far from his family, where he plans to have lots of windows and a big open living space to house all his creative pursuits. He’s currently working on a woodworking project for his girlfriend, whose identity he’s keeping private for now. Once he’s done with TV, he may return to his childhood dream of being a firefighter. But he’ll never stop playing in the wild. Whether it’s on- or off-camera, he says, “I would catch snakes for the rest of my life.”