“I wanted to adopt that demeanor of calm and of control that a lot of other champions have had. I could never come even remotely close to that,” says Harrison Whitaker. “I think if my heart rate ever got below 150, that was a win.”
Photo: Jeopardy Productions, Inc.
Spoilers ahead for the December 1, 2025, episode of Jeopardy!
When a Jeopardy! contestant does as well as super-champion Harrison Whitaker, it’s hard not to believe they were born for this. It’s also, evidently, hard not to wonder where they were born: While Whitaker was consistently identified as a Terre Haute, Indiana, native, viewers puzzled over his accent, which they maintain is vaguely British, perhaps owing to the fact that he now lives in the U.K. And they had plenty of time to speculate, since Whitaker won an impressive 14 games before being knocked out by challenger Libby Jones on the December 1 episode. Over the course of his nearly three-week run, Whitaker became the 19th Jeopardy! super-champ after winning his tenth game and broke the record for the highest single-day winnings for season 42, when he clinched a victory with $50,000.
If Whitaker wasn’t born for it, he certainly started prepping early. In one story that host Ken Jennings called (with light shade) “very Jeopardy!-coded,” Whitaker revealed that he could recite the American presidents in order before he learned how to read. That lifelong commitment to knowledge helped make Whitaker a dominant player, who has also parlayed his skills into a job writing questions for the British quiz show University Challenge. In his final anecdote on Jeopardy!, he said he’d use his winnings to open a bar where he’d be able to make the trivia as hard as he wants. (He’s gotten complaints hosting trivia nights in the past.) Now, he admits he’s not so sure. “I probably need to do some informal market testing first,” Whitaker says. “As much as I love my vision, I think history has proved that it may not be a shared one.”
Congratulations on an incredible run. We saw it all play out over the course of 15 games, but they were mostly filmed back-to-back. How long were you actually filming for?
I believe I filmed my first four games on October 7, and then I came back two weeks after that and played five games on that Monday, five games on that Tuesday, and then again went back to England, and then came back one week after that, and then played my first game and lost.
Wow. I was going to ask about jet lag, but I had no idea. You were really going back and forth during that time.
Yeah, I came back and forth after every filming block. I don’t think I played a single game on more than three, maybe four hours of sleep.
Well, that’s impressive. Do you regret doing it that way?
I do wish I’d been able to stay, but just with the demands of work, and also I do spend most of my time here [in the U.K.], there wasn’t much I could have done otherwise. I will say for the Tournament of Champions next year, I’ll be going to a kind of Pacific Time Zone base camp before adjusting well in advance.
You seemed very calm when you lost that last game, and of course gracious toward Libby. Is it bittersweet to have a run like this come to an end? I don’t know if there’s any sense of relief along with the sadness of not continuing on.
Yeah, you’ve captured it very well. Frankly, there’s a lot of sadness insofar as, that’s it. There’s no coming back from that. You don’t get to say afterward, “Guys, you know, it was close. Do I get to go again?” But on the other hand, you know eventually you’re going to lose. And Libby was the right person to lose to. Libby’s a fantastic player, and she played a fantastic game. And I played a fine game as well. I can’t be too mad at myself for things that happened. So having talked to Libby before and after the game, and certainly having played against her, I’m very glad that she was the one I lost to.
I saw you say you were really nervous behind the podium. Did the nerves ever get better for you along the way?
I wish I could say they did. It’s funny, because when you look back on it, if you won 14 games, you would think that maybe, you know, games four through 11, you were sort of coasting at that point. But ultimately, every time you step behind the podium, you know it may be your last. I wanted to adjust. I wanted to adopt that demeanor of calm and of control that I think a lot of other champions have had. I could never come even remotely close to that. I think if my heart rate ever got below 150, that was a win.
You had one close call, but many of these games were runaways. Is there a moment when you’re playing when you see how much is left on the board and you can at least breathe easy knowing it’s a lock?
Yeah, I do like to go for the high-value clues early on, obviously searching for Daily Doubles like everyone else. But even after the Daily Doubles are gone, I want to decide the game as soon as possible. I want to, if I can, try and give myself a bit of a cushion. Because I just find playing Jeopardy! really stressful and oddly emotional, like I’m sort of putting myself out there. Maybe you can see it when I buzz. Sometimes I’m putting my whole body into it. The sooner I can get it over with, the better.
Now that the show is airing on Hulu and Peacock, Jeopardy! contestants are getting recognized more, but have you been able to fly under the radar in the U.K.?
Nobody’s recognized me. Nobody’s cared in the least, which I don’t really mind. It’s funny waking up in the morning to 30 text messages, 200 new Instagram followers, and 1,000 emails. But then I go to work and literally no one cares.
Speaking of the U.K., when you Google your name, “accent” comes up right away. Do you think you have a British accent?
I don’t think I do. And what’s funny is, anybody who knew me when I lived in America, nobody thinks I have changed my voice at all, which makes me wonder, when I was 12 years old in Indiana and I went to Disney World, did people think I was a little British child? Presumably not. It’s a bit weird.
I think you have a very dignified way of speaking, which maybe reads as British to some Americans.
That’s a very diplomatic way of putting it.
I also saw people online saying you talk too fast.
Fish don’t know they live in water. I didn’t see myself as talking quickly. And in fact, when I’m there behind the podium, I hear the clues going by instantly, and I feel like I’m just talking at the pace of the show. Clearly, I am wrong. I’m ready to accept defeat on that.
So now I’ve rudely brought up people online saying you talk too fast and that you have an accent. Are you someone who’s looking at Jeopardy! reactions on Reddit, or are you trying to stay out of that world?
I looked at it a bit in the beginning, because I wanted to make sure that people didn’t think I was disgusting. And then once I got the sense that the average person thought I was a normal guy, I let up on it. There was one subreddit which I visit with some regularity that I’m not going to name here — I did wake up one morning and I looked at the front page and the top post was about how the poster in question despises the current Jeopardy! champion. That was a bit funny.
Did you happen to read their reasoning?
I read the reasoning, and then I moved on.
You’ve now done Jeopardy! in the U.S. and University Challenge in the U.K., and obviously have lived in both places. I was wondering what you’ve noticed about the differences between quizzing and trivia culture in the two countries.
The difference is large. I’m not one to hype up transatlantic cultural differences — I think we’re much closer than people imagine. But the quizzing is pretty different, because there’s a strata of U.K. quizzing culture where I think people pride themselves on being academic and obscure and maybe obtuse to a fault, whereas in the U.S., if you’re like that, there’s no outlet for you, good or bad. Jeopardy! is the most highbrow quiz show, and I love Jeopardy! And if you want to go to bar trivia, you’re not going to find a bar trivia that’s asking you about the, I don’t know, haiku of Hokusai. In the U.K., I think you can be as studious as you want to be, and there’ll be an outlet for you, whereas in the U.S., there’s a bit more of a ceiling.
You played the final game before the postseason cut-off. If you’d lost, you would have gone into the 2026 Tournament of Champions. Now, you’ll be playing in 2027. Was that something that was going through your head at all during that game?
I haven’t really watched Jeopardy! very regularly since I moved to the U.K. in 2021 and so I’m very not au fait on the seasons and the tournaments and the cut-offs. So when they said that, I was like, “What are you talking about?” You know, it didn’t make any sense to me at all. But believe me, it’s no love lost that I don’t have to play against people like Scott Riccardi and Paolo Pasco.
It seems like a double-edged sword that you have so much extra time to prep for the ToC, but that also means spending more than a year studying.
I’ve got to have a fun zone. So there’ll be some amount of time where I’m not prepping, because any prep done then would be a waste of time. But I will start at some point. I think what I like a bit less is that I now have to spend the next year watching for my competition. Like every new champion, I’m going to be thinking, Oh, I don’t know, how would I fare against them? So it’s the devil you know versus the one you don’t. And in this case, I’m stuck with the unknown devil.
Are there certain subjects that you felt weaker on while you were playing that you want to brush up on before the ToC?
The first part of the question, the answer is absolutely yes. The last part, do I want to brush up on them? I’m not so sure. I know nothing about cars. And every now and then, you’ll get a Jeopardy! category about cars. And my heart sinks lower than my body can hold it when I see that. I don’t know if I can spend time learning about the makes and models of Chevrolets and Toyotas. I just don’t think I can do it.
I mean, how many categories could there possibly be about cars?
I agree that it’s unlikely, but at the end of the day, you never know what’s going to come up. I’m also going to spend probably a little bit more time listening to country music in the next year than I would otherwise.
Are there any specific clues or categories from your games that still haunt you?
The answer is fundamentally no. There are clues that if I was playing by myself, I would have gotten 10 times out of 10, just sitting in my room. But when you’re up there and the pressure’s on and you’re playing two great people, it’s just different. I mean, one thing that’s really funny is in the game that I lost, there was that category about plays, basically listing the characters from plays. And I love theater. I used to work at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, just reading scripts for them to produce. I have read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plays, and I knew the answer to every single one, and I didn’t get a single one of them, because that’s just how strong my opponents were that game.
Did that come down to buzzer speed?
There’s this slightly strange phenomenon that I don’t know if anyone else has experienced, which is when I know the question to an answer, and I’m really excited about it, I almost never get it. Something happens unconsciously that makes me slow. There was an architects category in the game before that — like I knew all of them, but I was just so smugly satisfied with myself. I was like, Oh yeah, that’s Zaha Hadid. You’ve got this, Harrison. And then I just get out-buzzed.
Maybe the key then is to not let your body feel any excitement toward a category that you know well.
Exactly. I think I need to just stay nervous the whole time.
