February 13, 2026
Euan Cherry/Peacock
Michael Rapaport gained attention during his Season 4 run on 'The Traitors' for his brash behavior and unique method for eating pasta.
Actor Michael Rapaport knows what everyone has been saying about him. That he's loud. That he's annoying. That his table manners would send Emily Post into a coma.
But Rapaport, who is headlining three shows at Valley Forge Casino this weekend and was a recent contestant on "The Traitors," says the person viewers saw on the Peacock reality show was in some ways a character.
"Everything that I did on the show, part of it's performance, part of it's reality," he said Thursday. ".... The s***-talking aspect of it was definitely performance.
"I'm very aware of what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, and, you know, sometimes things land, sometimes things don't land. I look at it like a baseball player. You swing for the home run. I'm a home run hitter."
This rest of this story contains spoilers for Season 4 of 'The Traitors.'
Rapaport only lasted five episodes on the show's ongoing fourth season, but he was one of the most discussed players among the cast and fans. His fellow contestants cast him out of the castle not necessarily because they believed he was a traitor — a designated player secretly plotting against the rest of the so-called "Faithful" — but because they were so fed up with him. Rapaport had bothered several cast members with his brash personality and disruptive rants. Initially, however, he had formed a tentative alliance with Donna Kelce.
Kelce, the mother of Jason and Travis Kelce and the future mother-in-law of Taylor Swift, was the show's first "secret traitor," unknown even to the other backstabbers. Her fellow players correctly identified her as a traitor in Episode 3, voting her off the show. But Rapaport, who described her as "very sweet" and "very warm," said he never really saw her as a schemer.
"I only started suspecting her because everybody else was suspecting her," he said. "In the beginning there's so little to work off of. It's hard to know who's what, but you have to pick somebody. And for some reason, her name kept coming up."
Rapaport hung on for two more episodes after Kelce exited the show. In that time, he went viral for pioneering a new and, most would argue, disgusting way of eating pasta — lifting the plate directly in line with his mouth and scraping the noodles straight in. He called it his "shoveling technique" and insisted he only employs it in "dire situations."
came across this cool pic of Michael rapaport eating dinner pic.twitter.com/0vOV9hky3k
— monk's mood (@EF_escape) January 16, 2026
"I was in the room by myself and I was rushing to finish my food to go back out there and to mix it up with the rest of the cast," he said. "That was really it. And I hadn't eaten all day. When you're chasing around (Real) Housewives and people from 'Love Island,' you know, it gets tiring. So I was trying to eat my food as fast as I can and get back to capturing traitors."
What pushed his fellow players over the edge was a comment he made about contestant Colton Underwood. After branding the former "Bachelor" star and NFL defensive end "cowardly, conniving and commiserating" — not, as another contestant pointed out, the typical use of "commiserating" — Rapaport said no one on the show would be "better at holding a secret." Underwood, who came out in 2021, read the remark as an insinuation about the years he spent hiding his sexuality. Many other cast members took it that way, too.
Rapaport has said he was just "talking trash" after Underwood cast suspicion on him, and that he had a conversation with the one-time "Bachelor" after he left the show.
"It was just to clarify what I meant," Rapaport said. "I didn't want to offend him. I didn't want to disrespect him. It wasn't my intention, and I just wanted to articulate that to him, man to man. And I did that and it was received very well. ... I respect him as a person. I respect him as somebody that I went through this experience with and I just wanted to just clarify that and just wish him well."
Rapaport exited the show with typical bluster, declaring himself the "best-looking, smartest, dopest Faithful." Apart from his comment to Colton, he said he has few regrets about how he played the game, insisting he mostly aimed to entertain. The "Prison Break" and "Friends" actor even has argued that his interpretation of the word "commiserating" was correct. His definition, he said, is just not the most widely used one.
He still looked it up after the show, just to be safe.
Follow Kristin & PhillyVoice on Twitter: @kristin_hunt
| @thePhillyVoice
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice
Have a news tip? Let us know.
