Kate Chastain built her television career on being the person who ran the boat when nobody else could. As chief stewardess across six seasons of Bravo’s Below Deck, she was the calm, sharp-tongued authority holding the interior crew together through every charter-guest meltdown. Years later, she became the only person from Season 1 of The Traitors to return for Season 2, giving her one of the more unusual two-season arcs in the franchise’s history.
Before any of it, she was a college graduate who wandered into yachting almost by accident and never left.
Finding Yachting by Accident
Chastain graduated from the University of Central Florida with a degree in organizational communication. She took a break from school to travel and tried yachting on a whim, working her way up from laundry stewardess to chief stew over the following years. That climb through the ranks of luxury yacht service is exactly what got her noticed for Below Deck, where she joined as chief stew starting with Season 2 at age 30 and stayed for six seasons total.
Writing Lucky Charming
In 2017, Chastain published Lucky Charming, a memoir chronicling her path into the yachting world after graduating college at a personal crossroads. She has said she worked on the book on and off for close to eight years before it came together, and it gave fans a fuller picture of her life before cameras started following her around a boat.
Season 1: The Human Shield
Chastain played Season 1 of The Traitors as a Faithful, and much of her season revolved around a running feud with Rachel Reilly. Chastain came across as suspicious to other players simply by nature of her personality, so much so that the actual Traitors used her as a kind of human shield, letting suspicion fall on her while they stayed hidden. She repeatedly begged to be banished at the Round Table rather than sit through the tension, but the group kept her around instead. She was finally banished in the finale episode, in a vote led by eventual winner Cirie Fields, finishing 5th of 20.
Season 2: Recruited as a Traitor
Chastain’s Traitors story didn’t end there. She returned to Season 2 as a surprise mid-season addition, the only Season 1 castmate to come back, and this time she was recruited into the game as an actual Traitor rather than a suspected one. She lasted deep into the season, eventually going down as the last Traitor standing in the Season 2 finale, a full-circle twist for a player who had spent Season 1 trying to convince everyone she wasn’t one.
Life After Below Deck
Chastain has kept a steady media presence since leaving Below Deck. She took over hosting duties on Bravo’s Daily Dish podcast, discussing yachting nostalgia, Traitors storylines, and Bravo-universe gossip with a candor that carried over directly from her chief stew persona. In 2025, she joined the cast of House of Villains Season 3 alongside names like Tom Sandoval and Christine Quinn, though she has publicly pushed back on being cast as a “villain,” arguing her Traitors and Below Deck reputations were built on being blunt, not malicious. Between the podcast, the book, and two separate runs through The Traitors, Chastain has turned a reputation for being the most trustworthy person in any room into a genuinely durable second act.