Rob ‘Judge’ Rinder is as comfortable grilling guests on breakfast TV as he is eating tripe with Rylan. Now he’s embracing his legal side in a devilish reality show. “It’s the part I was born to play”, he tells Emma Higginbotham
When Rob Rinder’s agent rang him about The Inheritance, Channel 4’s ‘camp and cut-throat’ reality show which sees players battling over a dead aristocrat’s cash, he thought it was a joke.
“It’s everything that I love!” exclaims the barrister-turned-TV personality. “I said let me get this straight. The Deceased is played by Elizabeth Hurley. Icon! They want me to basically do what I do – be a legal executor. They want me to explore how people might behave in a social experiment, which I'm fascinated by. I mean, tick, tick, tick. Hello? Is this real?
“Then I looked at the filming schedule, realised it began around the first of April, and just assumed that it was a wind-up.” Happily it wasn’t. “So I was delighted, because as the late Diana Rigg said, ‘It’s the part I was born to play’.”
For those who haven’t heard the hype about The Inheritance, the new series from the creators of The Traitors which began on Sunday, here’s a quick recap. 13 players, ensconced together in a stately home, compete in team challenges to win chunks of Liz Hurley’s fortune. After each challenge, those who reckon they’ve worked the hardest put themselves up in front of a ‘jury’ of the remaining players – overseen by Rob as The Executor – and justify why they deserve the dosh. Inevitably, twists and turns await.
“It exceeded my expectations,” continues Rob, glowing with glee as we chat at Channel 4’s HQ in London. “I became completely addicted to it, and I wouldn't have done unless I was totally invested in the outcome.” Did he have favourites? “No lawyer has favourites,” he intones grandly. “I treated them entirely equally. But you can't help rather hoping that some do better than others, based upon how they've behaved. And as this programme explores, sometimes justice isn't served to the people who deserve it most.”
The theme of justice has been central in Rob’s career, firstly as a hugely successful criminal barrister, and then as ‘Judge Rinder’, who lit up daytime telly from his faux courtroom – more on that later. But it could have turned out very differently had he pursued his original dream of becoming an actor.
Born into a Jewish family in May 1978 – his father was a taxi driver, and his mother built up a publishing business from her bedroom after the couple split when he was little – young Rob always knew he was different. While his dad and younger brother were devoted Tottenham Hostpur fans, the closest he came to liking football was arranging his Panini cards in order of the players’ handsomeness. And his posh voice? All made up. “I know I sound terribly Mitford, but I grew up in around the corner from Amy Winehouse in Southgate, so how I sound was sort of invented at the age of five.
“I found being a child quite boring, and I was an insufferable secondary school student,” he continues. “I just didn't like being told what to do. It was so exhausting.” What did the other kids make of his plummy accent? “Well I went to grammar school, so I wasn't totally out of place, but I wouldn't have cared even then. My best friend was the school nurse, Mrs. Cornish. I'd sometimes avoid doing the boring thing – like attending biology, which suited the teacher as I wasn’t there being disruptive – and I'd go and sit in her medical room. We'd have a Strepsil and talk about the challenges of being married and that sort of thing.”
Academically Rob was in the top sets, but not remotely interested in schoolwork. Instead, he poured his heart into drama, and won a place in the prestigious National Youth Theatre aged 14. The following year he found himself on the West End stage with a young Chiwetel Ejiofor as Julius Caesar. “He was brilliant even then,” he recalls. “But I don't think I was very good. I was highly average.”
At sixth form, he met Mrs Grice, the teacher who changed his life. “She just said something seemingly banal: ‘You are really clever’. Nobody had said that to me before, and I thought, ‘Well, I'll give that identity a go’. I started to read, then fell in love with it, and became passionately invested in academic things.”
Arriving at Manchester University (Mrs Grice’s alma mater) to study Politics and Modern History (because she had), Rob thought he’d give acting another shot, and auditioned for a play. “I could tell the director thought, ‘Not bad!’. Then the next person went up, and I thought ‘Ah, that's what it's supposed to sound like’.” That person was Benedict Cumberbatch. “We were still teenagers, but his talent was in evidence already. It was the real thing. I couldn't inhabit a body in that way.” The two became great friends – years later, Benedict presided over Rob’s civil partnership to his ex, barrister Seth Cumming, and Rob was one of three best men at Benedict’s wedding.
With acting abandoned, Rob’s thoughts turned to law. “My university sport, because I was really cool, was debating,” he continues. “My debating partner and I got really good at it, and started winning competitions. We were debating against trainee barristers, and I remember thinking, I really like making logical arguments, and I definitely can’t live as an academic – I had a penchant for expensive shoes and Waitrose shopping even then.”
Graduating with a double first, he did a law conversion course, then began his legal career with a drive to specialise in crime. “I had an instinctive urge to stand between the individual and the State, knowing how important that is – that somebody's liberty is of sacred value,” he says. “But I didn’t really join the dotted line between that and my grandfather's story until a few months in.”
Morris Malenicky, Rob’s Polish-born maternal grandfather, had narrowly survived the Holocaust. His parents and five siblings were all murdered at Treblinka. The teenager was sent to a labour camp instead, then joined hundreds of other Jewish ‘Windermere children’ who began a new life in the Lake District after the war. “The gift, as he saw it, of being a British citizen, meant for me that if I was going to do this sort of work, that thing he fell in love with – democracy under the rule of law – really mattered,” says Rob. “I was partly walking in his shoes.
“And despite everything my granddad had been through, he never judged people based on anything other than how they behaved,” he adds. “I think that his openness to the world helped me become not just a better lawyer, but a better judge of character as well.”
Over the years, Rob’s extraordinary caseload spanned international fraud, government corruption, money laundering, war crimes and murder. Then life took an unexpected turn. A friend working in TV production wanted to resurrect the 1970s drama Crown Court. Rob wrote the script, and they took the idea to ITV’s head of daytime, Helen Warner. “She didn't want to make the programme, but there was just something about the chemistry between me and her,” he recalls. “She said ‘There's this guy Manchester who wants to make a court show. Go and meet him’. So I met him for lunch – there was no audition – and she put 20 episodes of Judge Rinder on telly without seeing a pilot. Nowadays, that would never, ever happen.”
Beginning in 2014, Judge Rinder was the British answer to America’s Judge Judy, which dealt with family squabbles and neighbourly disputes. For Rob, who was used to far higher stakes, it was an eye-opener.
“I said something really stupid in my opening case. Something like ‘This is a hundred pounds, that's not a lot of money’. My producer whispered in my ear: ‘Do you want to rephrase that? You sound like right posh dickhead.’ And she was totally right! The legal issue at the heart of that dispute was the same one I was dealing with when it was billions of dollars, and just as important. A hundred pounds can be a fortune.”
For seven years, Rob presided over cases ranging from disappointing wedding photographers to overly amorous dogs. “I loved it,” he says. “I gave authentic legal judgements, and people came away learning something from it. Also, it was always a win, especially in toxic family disputes over money, where they would be forced into a space where they had to hear one another. On innumerable occasions, they'd walk out of court going, ‘Let's try and find a way of rebuilding’. I really cared about that, and still do.”
Thanks to his flamboyant charm and scathing one-liners, nobody was surprised when Rob swapped his black court robes for pink sequined shirts and sashayed onto the Strictly dancefloor in 2016. For the barrister, who finished fifth with partner Oksana Platero, it was a surreal time. “I remember somebody saying ‘You must be working so hard’. And I thought, try and explain that to my friend who’s on the way to the Old Bailey! Her briefs are covered in sick because she's got three children with chicken pox, and I’m phoning up and going, ‘Listen, I'm working very hard, but I can't get this cha-cha right’.”
Yet for all the glitzy fun, Rob is taken deadly seriously as a broadcaster. He’s gone on to make hard-hitting documentaries about the Middle East, the Holocaust and life in British prisons, historical specials ranging from the Blitz to the Great Plague, and is a regular presenter on Good Morning Britain (his forensic grilling of Hannah Ingram-Moore was a sight to behold).
There’s warmth, too. Take last year’s BBC hit Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour, where he accompanied fellow presenter and camp icon Rylan Clark on a cultural trip to Italy – partly to heal their broken hearts following their respective divorces, but also to introduce him to everything from classical art to offal-laced delicacies. It turned out that Rylan was far more perceptive than anyone, least of all Rob, suspected (although he couldn’t be persuaded to love tripe). A viewer favourite, the show scooped a Bafta. Did he know it would be so popular? “Not at all! Rylan said ‘We're either going to win a Bafta or get cancelled’, and you know how it ended. So that was good.”
With a new India-bound Grand Tour airing this autumn, clickbait headlines continue to suggest that they’re a couple. “We are in love, just not married love,” he shrugs. “Aren't you in love with your best friends? I understand why people want us to be together in that way, but we're not. Although it has been strange, because bots keep inventing that we are together. It's amazing that people believe it, even though the pictures don't like me at all. They look like the love child of Jamie Laing and Vladimir Putin.”
He is, he says, “a confirmed and happy bachelor. My friends are the loves of my life. So many people make the assumption that if you are not in a romantic relationship, you must be thirstily searching for a partner, but actually there is a small bracket of us that get our fulfilment from the people that are our chosen family.”
Away from the screen, Rob conducts, speaks Russian, plays the piano, runs marathons, has written three Sunday Times bestselling novels and, still a member of Chambers, teaches law and mentors young people. Yet he insists he has imposter syndrome. “I think we all have it,” he clarifies. “I'm always slightly suspicious of anybody that doesn't, because it’s the barrier that protects you from becoming Kim Jong-un.”
His mission, he says, is simply to share his enthusiasm for knowledge. “What I really love comes back to The Inheritance. Of course there’s drama, but at the core of it there's a real social experiment taking place, and you learn something about the law. I want people to be culturally curious. Like Mrs Grice, I want to help people be their best self.”
FOOD BITES
What was for breakfast? An orange, because I can’t do breakfast television on a full stomach. Then at 11.30 I had a poke bowl. I'm very particular – it has to be a mix of really good salmon and tuna, brown rice, and chilli oil on top.
Favourite Jewish food? Shmaltz herring. It's herring preserved in fat, and you can sometimes get it in Waitrose. I really love my mum's chicken soup followed by a bit of shmaltz herring with a glass of single malt whisky.
Your last supper? My guilty food pleasure is McDonald's filet-o-fish. I’m addicted. My best friend Sarah Willingham has put a version on the menu at Drift, her new restaurant in Brighton, in honour of me.
Most famous person you’ve dined with? Robbie Williams, Benedict Cumberbatch and Princess Anne. Not all at the same time. What a great beginning of a joke!
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in September 2025 (c) Waitrose