It happened. Again.

Britney Haynes once again crushed the reality TV dreams of Danielle Reyes, this time on the season 3 finale of The Traitors. The history between the two dates back to Big Brother Reindeer Games, when Britney orchestrated Danielle’s Reindeer Games elimination on a  hamster wheel maze, even though another player (Taylor Hale) volunteered to do the challenge instead of Danielle. 

The two quickly — if a bit awkwardly — made up when they both showed up in a castle to play The Traitors, working together to get themselves further in the game. The alliance was solidified when Danielle later recruited Britney to join her as a Traitor. But after a deadlocked banishment vote between Danielle and Ivar Mountbatten, Britney changed her vote to Danielle — mistakenly believing that Dolores Catania had signaled her to do so. The result was emotional chaos as Britney wept while a shocked Danielle mournfully murmured, “You did it to me again.”

Britney soon followed Danielle out of the castle when the rest of the Faithful banished her at the next Roundtable, leaving the Big Brother fan favorite tantalizingly close to the final prize. We spoke to Britney to get the inside story on her shocking vote, the fallout with Danielle, and where the two are now with each other.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Can you take us through your emotional state as Dolores turns over her chalkboard and you see the name Ivar on it?

BRITNEY HAYNES: My emotional state? I was wrecked for what that was going to do to Danielle. Personally, I felt that I had made the right decision for myself out of an act of self-preservation within the game, regardless of what Dolores did. But I was very emotional for what I knew that would mean in terms of our friendship and what I had felt to be a very real rekindling reconnection in the castle and in terms of what we had hoped would be the ultimate end into the game. That was the emotion that you saw just Yeah, it was awful.

Did it even occur to you in the moment that this was turning into a giant Shakespearean tragedy and that Big Brother fans were going to lose their minds over this?

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve lived it already before once. This is the 2.0 for me. This is the sequel. So I had already lived through that before and I hated it the first time, and I hated again. Surprise, surprise, I hated again! But all I can say — and this entire day is going to be me defending myself nonstop, and that’s fine because you make the bed and you lay in it — but what I will say is I never had any malicious intent against Danielle whatsoever.

Prior to us losing Dylan and her losing Dylan’s vote, we were on Easy Street. We were in the honeymoon phase. We were going to walk hand in hand into the finale and have the best time of our lives. But it was all contingent on what she believed was Dylan’s very real loyalty to her. And when she lost Dylan and lost the ear of all of those other people by proxy, and then I essentially saw her as being completely dead in the water, that’s when I had to switch in my mind and act out of self-preservation and say, “Okay, what does a Faithful do in this situation? Because tomorrow I’m going to have to defend myself as a Faithful and I need to act like a Faithful.”

If Dolores votes against Danielle, and I’m literally the only person sitting at this table who refused to vote for Danielle, how does that look for me? Not good. But if you went to the banishment table and everybody there, including Dylan, was going after Gabby, do you think I would’ve raised my hand and said, “No, no, you guys, we need to consider Danielle?” No, absolutely not. I would’ve gladly thrown a vote to whoever I thought was going to be in the majority. It’s just unfortunate that by that point, so many people were onto Danielle that the majority was going to her.

You had figured out before you were recruited that Danielle was a Traitor, so a few questions on that: Were you not trying to get her out before then because of your history on Reindeer Games and not wanting to crush her reality TV dreams again? Did that play a factor?

No, I think that as a Faithful, she was keeping me in the game. It was not going to benefit me in any way, shape, or form to turn on her. I don’t want to dismiss the fact that yes, Reindeer Games started us off on a rocky path, but I genuinely enjoyed working together. She’s fun to work with — just like the analyzing of things and we see eye to eye because we both come from Big Brother and we will reference Big Brother to each other in conversation.

So I genuinely enjoyed the process of working with her in the castle. And she was keeping me around. I was benefiting her game by being loyal to her, working with her and giving her information, and she was benefiting my game by not murdering me and defending me when other people wanted to murder me early on. So it was a reciprocal relationship.

So what was your plan in terms of dealing with her as a Traitor had you not been recruited?

To be honest with you, people were catching onto her more and more and more, and I kind of saw the writing on the wall for her even weeks ahead because I started to hear her name come up. I started to hear people talk about her, and I would never pile on because I didn’t want it to get back to her that I was piling on. I would always just take it like, “Oh, really? I don’t know.” But I saw that her game was catching up to her. It was pretty apparent to see in real time more people kind of catching on and noticing things that she was doing. And then after the Carolyn vote especially, it was like that.

Honestly, to me, when Danielle lost the game, a huge moment is going to be when she lost Dylan’s vote. But prior to that even, it was the Carolyn vote, because even Gabby said, “This read as Traitor on Traitor.”  That is when she lost Gabby. That is when she really sealed her own fate, was with that whole Carolyn thing. And I saw that coming even in my Faithful seat.

So then once she brought me on as a Traitor, I was like, “Okay, I have to really go to work now.” And you saw me frantically running around the castle trying to collect votes for her and trying to change people’s minds and get the vote onto somebody else. I really actually went to work to try to make it happen. But the truth is, her game at that point, it had really caught up to her. And that’s not to discredit her. She had been a Traitor since day one. She’s been constantly working against leaving a trail of blood from the very beginning — super, super tough position to be in, and she made it very, very far. But the truth is, it had caught up to her.

I don’t know how it works out there in Scotland. Did you get a chance to talk to her with cameras off before you all left the country to try and mend fences immediately out there?

No, I left completely on my own. That being said, though, I did talk to her after the fact, and I continued to talk to her after we finished filming.

So where are you two now?

I think good. It’s tricky. If we were ever to play a game together again — which, who knows if that would even happen — I would understand her perspective. I would understand her hesitancy. Of course, that makes perfect sense. I care much less about that than I care about her understanding that personally, I have the utmost respect for her and that I was acting out of self-preservation and that it wasn’t malicious and that it wasn’t intended to be a personal or malicious thing. It was just what I thought that I needed to do to try to keep my hands clean. I think the water is even muddier. I’m sure that that’s true in a game sense. My hope is that it’s not hopefully not true in the real world. We’re not on TV anymore. We’re just two people. You know what I mean? In a personal person-to-person sense.

Anything you could have done differently at your final Roundtable when you and Dylan were going at each other and you got banished? Did you come on too strong?

No, I don’t think there’s anything that I could have done differently. I think I had an objectively really strong argument. Dylan had good argument too, but what was nice was that anything Dylan presented about me, I could kind of mirror back to him. I also don’t think that I was too aggressive. I was fighting for my life, and over the course of the entire argument, it escalated in a much more organic way than it looks on TV, which is chopped and compressed.

But in real time, I feel like it kind of gained momentum at a normal pace. I didn’t just shoot out the gate like, “I’m going to go through Dylan!” The truth is, being a Traitor in that situation, I was in absolutely no control of who sat at that final Roundtable. That was Danielle’s final Roundtable. That’s how it was designed the entire game, not mine. I definitely wouldn’t have had Dylan at the table, but I would’ve had different people in all seats of that table.

Most likely, if I were a Traitor from day one, it would’ve been a completely different table that I was arguing to. I got thrown in with those people at no choice of my own in the 11th hour and had to try to make the best of it. I don’t think that I could have made a better argument.  I think my fate was even more sealed than we saw. I was genuinely, like, so toast. I was cooked.

Was it hard being that close to the end and watching someone like Dolores win, who by her own admission was not exactly astute about the game you all were playing?

It has absolutely nothing to do with who actually did win. Because if I don’t win, I don’t care who does. But yeah, it’s worse whenever you get close. It’s not worse. Objectively, of course, you look back on it, you want to be there as long as possible and you want to keep trying. I’m happy that I lasted as long as I did and gave it the shot that I did. However, it’s a tougher pill to swallow to lose, for sure. For me watching, it is actually painful. It is actually guttural, awful, painful, and nothing but a negative association for the final episode.

Finally, were you the meekest of the Traitors?

Good question. No, I do not think that I’m the meekest of the Traitors. I mean, listen, I could go on a one-hour tangent about how not meek I am, but also if this is the narrative we want to go with, that I’m some kind of church mouse, fine. I’ll be it. Great. Let that be my narrative going out. It’s crazy to me because it’s never been what anybody said about me before, but if we want to roll with this — sure, let’s roll with it. I’m so quiet. So never had an opinion in my life.

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