Who Is Ruth Codd From Celebrity Traitors UK?
Ruth Codd is one of those rare, quietly defiant people whose life refuses to fit some neat narrative arc, even if a Netflix casting director might wish otherwise. If you’ve caught any of the rampant chatter around the first season of Celebrity Traitors UK, you know she’s one of the more intriguing names on the cast list, a kind of wildcard with sharper edges than most reality TV “celebrities”. But who, really, is Ruth Codd?
Ruth is a 29-year-old Irish actress, best known for starring as Anya in Netflix’s The Midnight Club, a creepy, clever horror series that is worth catching just for her performance alone. That story, though, is only the tip of the iceberg.
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She was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1996, and grew up there in what sounds like a pretty warm, occasionally chaotic family, with a brother who came along “when Ruth was three,” she’s joked, only half-grudgingly admitting she wanted a sister. But real life, in all its haphazardness, had other plans.
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When Ruth was 15, everything shifted. Picture a typical, slightly bored school day, maybe with that cold Irish drizzle hanging around, then a burst of football and an accident a bad one. Ruth severely injured her leg. For years, the pain and operations kept coming. Imagine being a teenager, stuck on crutches while it seemed like everyone else’s life was speeding up, not slowing down. She’s said her whole world became about rehabbing her leg—fighting with her body, fighting with her own frustration. When she finally decided, at age 23, to amputate below the knee, it was almost, as she put it, a "relief," because it let her get on with her life instead of waiting for something impossible.
And here’s something you notice interviewing actors and entertainers: the best ones nearly always have some story like this, a hard reset that forges a strange kind of confidence. For Ruth, this meant not just going back to her old ambitions, but changing lanes altogether. She originally trained as a barber and makeup artist, her steady hands and creative eye earning her loyal clients in Wexford. The pandemic, that great career resetter, meant her old job disappeared almost overnight. So, like many of us who didn’t know what else to do, she took to TikTok, making sketches, sharing observations, maybe leaning a little into the gallows humor that life had dealt her.
Her videos were a mix: one moment she’s making deadpan jokes about nuns, the next she’s getting frank about disability, about surgical scars, about the messiness of bodies.
People noticed. Within a year, her following hit six figures, a fluke, or maybe inevitable. It’s easy to forget social media can actually still work this way. Netflix casting scouts saw Ruth, and something clicked: they gave her, an acting novice, a starring role in The Midnight Club based on a whim, an instinct for people who cut through the script. Mike Flanagan, the series’s much-lauded creator, was so impressed that he cast her in his next big show, The Fall of the House of Usher. Hollywood soon loomed on the horizon: this year, Ruth showed up in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, playing Phlegma, with her character’s artificial leg actually worked into the script as part of the design for the first time.
My favorite anecdote of Ruth’s “so what, let’s try this” attitude? When asked if she had a strategy for Celebrity Traitors, she basically shrugged: “I chopped off my own leg and taught myself to walk again. So, you know, I’m a very adaptable person, if anything.” There’s something both fierce and funny in that resilience, sure, but worn lightly, with honesty about how weird and human it sometimes feels to be called a “celebrity” at all.
So far in the castle, Ruth’s brought exactly what you’d hope: a willingness to laugh at herself, fashion choices that turn heads, a fashionably sarcastic take on alliances, and the occasional smart-aleck comment. She never sounds fully comfortable with the whole charade, which makes her ironically the most watchable person in the room.
