Major spoilers for Peacock’s The Traitors ahead—[in Alan Cumming’s Scottish accent] read at your own risk.

Fans will remember The Traitors season 3 for its ruthless Traitor-on-Traitor deceit. So was it any wonder that four Faithfuls walked away with victory? “Just like life, things are better with company,” says season breakout Dylan Efron after claiming more than $200,000 in prize money during Monday’s finale, which is now streaming on Peacock alongside a heated reunion special. “And I wanna win with people I trust.” That would be fellow winners Dolores Catania of Real Housewives of New Jersey, British royal Ivar Mountbatten, and former Bachelorette Gabby Windey.

This feel-good conclusion followed an hour of treachery where divisive Danielle Reyes finally fell as Traitor, thanks to the vote of her frenemy-turned-recruit, Britney Hynes. “You did it to me, again,” Reyes tells her fellow Big Brother alum. “I didn’t think Britney would be my nail in the coffin.” Her harsh words cast suspicion among the show’s remaining Faithfuls, who later unanimously voted to banish Hynes as well. “Think of me when the wind blows,” she says upon her exit. “I hope you freeze.” But what did she mean by her poetic parting words? “No idea,” Windey, traveling out of the country days after announcing her recent marriage to standup comedian Robby Hoffman, writes via email.

Vanity Fair separately spoke to all four of the Traitors victors in their first interviews since their win, just before they descended upon Club Cumming, host Alan Cumming’s East Village bar, for an intimate celebration.

Some were eager to share their loved ones’ reactions to the news. “Robby makes everything special, even the banalities of daily life. Isn’t that what marriage is (spoken as a wife of two months)??” writes Windey, who says she plans to use some of her prize money to buy Hoffman a wedding gift. Efron says his older brother Zac (yes, that one) always believed in him: “My brother said in an interview—I was still in the castle when I got word of it—’Oh, Dylan’s going to win.’ He was sure of it.”

Others were still processing all that had happened before the shocking finale. “No one’s going to believe it,” says Catania from her home in New Jersey. “There’s such a twist at the end.”

Gabby Windey, Alan Cumming, Ivar Mountbatten, Dolores Catania, and Dylan Efron in The Traitors season 3 finale.Peacock

Vanity Fair: Congratulations on winning The Traitors season 3. What was the first thing you did upon leaving the castle?

Dylan Efron: I was craving sun and a routine. We had pretty bad weather out there, and so when I got back it was all about just trying to get back into a healthy routine, back to the gym, back to road trips, back to everything I loved doing.

Windey: Went shopping at Duty Free! Retail therapy is real and when jet-lagged in Heathrow Airport it’s proven to be even more effective.

Catania: Right from the airport, I went to my mom’s house for spaghetti and meatballs. It was perfect. And I came back so healthy. Scottish food is farm-to-table. And everything is so freaking fresh. My body, I was like a machine. In the last mission, I ran the whole way. I can’t walk down the stairs without losing my breath right now. So it was a very cathartic, cleansing time for me. And I feel like I did play a good game. I don’t care. That’s my opinion.

Was there a most pivotal point in the game for any of you?

Efron: I had a low, around when Boston Rob [Mariano] went home. It felt like, “This is my time to take a back seat and listen,” because I obviously wasn’t on the Boston Rob boat. Then we voted out Ciara [Miller], which I didn’t want to do, and I was like, “Dude, I’d rather go home than just sit back and let Faithfuls go home.” So after Ciara’s vote, we started playing the game of: Why are we still here? Playing that game for myself, I realized Danielle was most likely a Traitor. Playing that game for Tom [Sandoval], we realized Carolyn [Wiger] was most likely a Traitor. We gained a bit more confidence once it got more manageable. When it’s down to 10 people, it’s a much different game than when it’s 23.

Ivar Mountbatten: I’m a pretty calm person and relatively unflappable, and had a great advantage over everybody else in the fact that I didn’t know anybody. But I had to modify my gameplay after the first mission where I said we needed the boys to stay in the boat because what you didn’t appreciate is that it was a very, very windy day. I just pointed out, “Listen, boys, get out, but it’s going to be very tough to row the boat back.” I was almost proven right, because we literally just must have missed the pontoon getting back and had we missed it, we would’ve lost all the money. Clearly that ruffled a few feathers. Bob Harper instantly took a disliking to me because he ran off like a scolded cat.

He mentioned in my interview with him that you two didn’t get off to the best start. Did you hash anything out at the reunion?

Mountbatten: No, not at all. He didn’t even say hello to me, which is rather telling. And yeah, I read the piece the other day, and he said I was the only person he didn’t really care about. So that’s fine. I am the most unpolitically correct person there is. I don’t do all this woke business, I just say it as it is, and he clearly didn’t like it—but that’s his problem, not mine. So after that, I just played the gray man and clearly it worked. All the big characters went out, didn’t they?

Some have accused Dolores and Ivar of being floaters in this game, staying under the radar and not making many big moves.

Mountbatten: If you want to make good TV, then you don’t want to play that game. But if you want to make good TV, like all the gamers, they clearly didn’t win. They didn’t last because they irritate people and they’re just big characters and it’s all me, me, me, me, look at me. Interestingly, all four winners, possibly not quite so much Gabby, but all are pretty authentic people. And I think that’s what brought everybody to the end. I mean, Gabby’s a great person and a lot of fun to be around, but certainly Dolores played her own game, and she wasn’t flashy or over the top.

Catania: I spoke up when I needed to. When I wasn’t sure, I didn’t. Other people at the roundtable didn’t have a big voice. I didn’t see Britney talking for the first four episodes. I was the first one to write down Bob the Drag Queen’s name. So I played exactly the way I should have. I wouldn’t change anything except the next time I play I would go in knowing more than I did. Dylan grew up watching these games. Gabby was super familiar with it. If you’re familiar with it, you’re more boisterous.

Efron: I didn’t think Dolores or Iver played a worse game than me. They won the show, so you can’t really criticize their game. It was one of those things where the smart thing to do [would be] to go down to two. If I was going to do that, it would be with Gabby. At that point, I did think she was the most Faithful of everybody and Ivar—I was pretty damn sure was a Faithful, and then Dolores, you have to really nitpick to think of how she would be a Traitor. It would’ve been her voting history, the fact that she was so protective of Danielle. There were small flags that were getting raised, we had to be prepared, but we just didn’t want to go there.

Efron, Catania, and MountbattenPeacock

Dolores and Ivar both voted to banish each other multiple times during the show.

Mountbatten: I liked Dolores. We had a long lunch together in LA at the reunion, and we got on very well together. I always thought there was a high likelihood that one of the Housewives was going to be a Traitor. There were four or five of them, so it was a high probability that one might be. Though initially I voted for her and then she voted for me and it carried on like that, there was no malice in it at all. I do think that perhaps she didn’t see the light with Danielle, but Danielle was a friend of hers. And so you always like to see the best in people, don’t you?

Catania: Those that do things accuse you. That’s why Ivar trying to point a finger at me, or Tom Sandoval—we all know what Tom Sandoval is capable of. I knew what Tom Sandoval was capable of before I got there. I didn’t know what Boston Rob was capable of. Britney, Danielle, Carolyn—I didn’t know them, but I knew Tom. So I was able to vote for Tom not only emotionally, because he was coming for me constantly, but because I knew what he was capable of.

Where do you stand now with Tom Sandoval?

Catania: Tom is exactly what I always thought he was. I don’t appreciate certain things he said—that I wasn’t playing hard in the missions, which I absolutely was. No one can say I didn’t carry my own weight. So I don’t like his reasoning for voting for me. Why are people saying, “You threw votes away on Tom?” when he threw votes away on me. I have nothing else to go off. Those gamers, they know each other. They know they’re fucking liars. They know that they’d lie on their kids or their mother. I did not know them from a hole in the wall.

Dylan, you suspected Gabby of being a Traitor until the very last second. When and why did you ultimately decide to trust her?

Efron: The show underplayed how much I thought Gabby was a Traitor. But then it fully switched with the chess game [in episode nine]. That morning, I came to the conclusion that Gabby was 100 percent Faithful because one, I would’ve been dead in the murder in plain sight [elimination] or Tom would’ve been dead and the last person Gabby would’ve murdered in plain sight is Chriselle [Stause]. I don’t think Bachelorette girls are that savage—it’s not Survivor. We really were on the same page, working together to get Danielle out that night. Then once there was a recruitment, of course you have to cast a little doubt on everybody. So I started to rethink, oh man, what if it is Gabby? But I actually had a lot of trust in her.

I also talked to Bob the Drag Queen recently, and he downplayed your skills. What’s your response to him saying you actually were not that good of a player, even though you are one of the winners?

Efron: I love Bob the Drag Queen. And I guess my response would be, that’s easy to say when you were only in the castle for four days. He didn’t get to see my strategy.

Efron and Windey during the season’s final challenge.Peacock

Gabby, how did you prepare for your dominant performance at the roundtable where Danielle was banished? Were you surprised later to see that she had sworn to “annihilate” you?

Windey: I’m a natural, what can I say! When you are speaking from a place of truth, aka not lying your ass off like a traitor, a sound defense (or offense in this case) comes naturally. I’m never surprised when someone underestimates me. The shock factor makes revenge sweeter in the end.

Ivar, when you saw Danielle and Britney’s votes flipping away from Gabby and towards you, what was going through your mind?

Mountbatten: Funny enough, I had completely forgotten that had happened. It was only when we were watching it before the reunion. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m nearly going to go out.” And I almost hid under the bed because I couldn’t bear it. That’s how bad my memory is.

I was very sure that Danielle was [a Traitor], and it seemed logical that she would’ve recruited Britney, which I think was a bad play on her part. She should have gone for Dylan or myself, somebody way out there. And the outcome may have been completely different. It was no surprise when Dolores did vote for me. Anybody with a half an ounce of intelligence would’ve suddenly done the same because there were only six of us.

What were you feeling in that moment when Danielle was directly pleading with Dylan not to vote for her?

Efron: Look, I wasn’t going to change my vote. There was no way. But I’m feeling all the feelings. I’m seeing someone that I trust and that’s a friend pleading with me and it is very crushing, honestly. But I had faith that I could put my strategy first and as much as it did suck, I had just been through this with Carolyn, so I knew I needed to do the right thing and that we would still be friends after this.

Mountbatten: Danielle played a very good game. She got an awful lot of criticism, but you can’t fault her. She was out to win. There was a lot of criticism about her swearing on her grandchildren, but she made it quite clear that in her book, that was fair play for her. It didn’t quite get her to the end, but there we go.

Bob the Drag Queen, Danielle Reyes, Efron, and Catania at The Traitors season 3 reunion.PEACOCK

Dolores, I feel like Danielle swearing on her grandchildren that she wasn’t a Traitor is something you truly took to heart.

Catania: Of course I did. Being lied to hurt more than being murdered, to be honest with you. Danielle tried to say in your article that I said it first. I did, because I didn’t lie. In retrospect, no one should do it—lying or telling the truth. However, don’t point a finger at me because you did it and lied to me. Because nobody twists anyone’s arm to do anything. I would’ve believed her just as much if she would’ve said, “I’m telling the truth, but I don’t swear on my family.” That would’ve been enough for me to believe her. Everybody knows my family means the world to me. I’m loyal and wouldn’t do such a thing. But I forgot that maybe somebody else would do that.

These are hardcore gamers. Here’s the thing: you don’t know who’s showing up. I’ve never watched Survivor or Big Brother. So I didn’t know what they were capable of. Boston Rob said at the reunion, “I would take a kid like Dylan, who looks up to me, right to the end and then I would kill him.” That stabbed me in my heart. But now I know that when you enter that game, anything that you believe in, any moral, ethical thing—leave it at the door.

Was Danielle’s late stage recruitment of Britney the Traitors’ biggest mistake?

Catania: Why recruit Britney? I told Danielle at the reunion, “You deserved to get stabbed in the back because [she’s someone] someone that screwed you over once before. Why would you do that?” There’s a saying, “Fuck me once, shame on you. Fuck me twice, shame on me.” If I was a Traitor and somebody ever stabbed me in the back, they would not have been my confidant here.

There were a few issues. Why waste kills on people who aren’t threats in the game, like Housewives? That was the dumbest thing. What are you proving, Bob the Drag Queen? I don’t think he was a good Traitor.

Mountbatten: The second mistake was Rob voting for Bob, because had he not, I think it would’ve been a very different outcome. There wouldn’t have been so much arguing going on. When Alan did his teasers before the show aired, the deceit and all of this, we were thinking, really? And of course, it becomes very apparent as soon as it [airs], which was very interesting. I probably got as far as I did because I was the ultimate Faithful in the fact that Bob the Drag Queen did me a great favor voting for me in the first two roundtables. A Traitor really wouldn’t go after another Traitor in the first roundtable or the second.

Would any of you have accepted recruitment as a Traitor?

Efron: I would’ve had to at that point. I’ve talked to Danielle about it too, and she’s like, “Dylan, one, I would’ve recruited you and you would’ve been awful,” which probably would’ve been great for her. If I just went in there red-cheeked and was like, “Oh, I can’t lie.”

But on the flip side, she’s like, “If I would’ve recruited you, you just could’ve won the whole thing.” And that is a very valid point because I had a really good grasp on the people that were suspicious of Danielle. So it would’ve been very easy for me to say, “Yeah, let’s keep Tom around,” or “Let’s maybe murder Britney.” I could have manipulated the situation to win it by myself if that’s what I wanted. Maybe I would’ve wanted to finish it with Danielle or won it all by myself. It’s an unplayed version of this show that would’ve been very fun.

Catania: Anybody’s capable of lying, of killing. In the real world, in real life, every single person is capable of doing anything to anyone. It would’ve been very uncomfortable for me. But maybe I would’ve liked it. Maybe I would’ve gotten into character. Maybe I would’ve been fucking great at it. But it wouldn’t have been as easy for me as getting people to trust me.

What did it feel like to banish Britney without getting to learn if she was a Traitor or Faithful until after already claiming the prize money?

Catania: After what I saw Britney do to Danielle, to turn on somebody that was so close to her, she had to be a Traitor. Because the whole game, Traitors turned on Traitors. I learned, in the game, evil can’t stay with evil. At that point, all’s fair in love and war.

Efron: That was definitely one of my most vulnerable points with that show. Britney’s calling me a Traitor, so I would’ve understood if [the other finalists] got rid of me, and I think that’s why I was so down to just end the game with the four of us. That moment in particular—when Gabby, Dolores and Ivar had my back—I just was like, “Dude, let’s finish together. I don’t want to be cutthroat. I don’t want to ruin any of your games. We won this together. I know you guys are Faithfuls.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

Mountbatten, Windey, Efron, and Catania at The Traitors season 3 reunion.PEACOCK