Life
Rob Rinder: ‘Watching how people react when confronted by money on The Inheritance surprised me’
JRob Rinder stars alongside Elizabeth Hurley in this devious new game show from the creators of The Traitors
September 4, 2025 12:43
JRob Rinder stars alongside Elizabeth Hurley in this devious new game show from the creators of The Traitors
September 4, 2025 12:43For fans of The Traitors, a new game show is on Channel 4 and it stars the JC’s very own columnist Rob Rinder, alongside Elizabeth Hurley.
The Inheritance comes from Channel 4’s Studio Lambert, the production company which created the aforementioned Traitors. The premise is an intriguing one: 13 strangers are summoned to a grand stately home where they compete for a part of the fortune left in the will of a glamorous benefactor. Then ensues a series of assignments in which the players must work together to complete the final requests of “The Deceased”, then race – in a devious fashion – to make the winnings theirs. The Deceased is played by Hurley, and The Executor and trusted legal counsel is played by Rinder.
At a promotional screening and Q&A with the stars and its creators, Rob Rinder said that despite his vast expertise and knowledge in the legal world role in the show challenged his typically astute intuition when it comes to people’s behaviour.
“I'm not really surprised by anything, as you can imagine,” he told the audience. “I've seen the full buffet of legal life. Consequently, one of the things you need to have is an intuitive and quite informed sense of how people are going to behave. And I really thought I did. And I have to say, this experience – watching it evolve, watching how people when confronted by money, when confronted by a challenging dilemma, how they might react, I was wrong on more than one occasion, and that really did surprise me.”
As for whether anyone in the cast stood out immediately to him, Rinder said, “The thing about being a barrister – and I was privileged to do serious work – is that within weeks of having encounters with people from every walk of life, when you're engaging with the issue of fairness or justice, all of your thin or deep subconscious bias immediately disappear.”
Having been in television, hosting the reality courtroom series Judge Rinder then the Channel 4 series The Rob Rinder Verdict, Rinder says he had “rather lost” that quality for a while. However, his role in The Inheritance brought it back for him.
“Within moments of watching how people react, confronted by the deep dilemma that we lose our ear for: what happens when you put a fortune in front of somebody and ask them how they might behave? You cannot predict anything based on all of the superficial things. And I think what this show does is not just explore that, but teach us something which is a really deep and enduring value, in a way that I was delighted to be re-surprised by.”
Channel 4’s head of reality and entertainment Steve Handley explained the thinking behind the show: “At the heart of it, it asks quite an interesting question, and that is, ‘what does it really take to get what you think you deserve in life?’” This he called a “parable” for today’s society. “A lot of people feel that, is it merit, or is it people that are entitled? Is it people that can bend people to their will? This game really exposes all of that.”
As for whether Rinder and Hurley thought they might have fared well in the show, Rinder was not convinced. “Don’t be absurd, I have no transferable skills,” he quipped. “You actually have to be able to do things.”
But his counterpart thought otherwise. “You could sit back and be brainy,” said Hurley.
The Inheritance is on Channel 4 now
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.