Looking for love in all the wrong islands.
I had been hiding in the toilet cubicle for 15 minutes when I got the message that would change my life forever.
It was March 2019. I was 22, fresh out of university, and working front of house at a production company in London, which is a fancy way of saying that I was the office dogsbody. As far as entry-level jobs went, it was par for the course: long hours, mindless tasks, minimum wage – so you’ll understand why I spent long yawning stretches of the day hiding in the dark stalls.
Then I received a message request from an enthusiastic stranger named Lewis. ‘Hey there! I’m the senior casting producer for Love Island – I found your page and I thought I’d reach out as we’re always on the lookout for hot new talent! Are you around for a quick call?’
In 2019, Love Island was the biggest show in the uk. The opening episode of season four had smashed itv2 audience records. When a cinema in Derry announced they were showing the series finale, they sold out two screens in 45 minutes.
And the show was more than just a ratings monster – it was a golden ticket to fame, fortune and millions of followers. Or at least it was in those halcyon days of the early seasons.
Instantly I imagined all I could do with Love Island fame. Sponsorships, book deals, spin-off shows, charity singles, action figures, theme parks. But there was also another reason I found the message so compelling. At the time, my own sexuality felt like a mystery that needed solving.
Although I believed I was the kind of boy who liked bums, boobs, and Megan Barton-Hanson, I wondered why sex left me cold, and why intimate relationships with women filled me with dread.
Back then, those feelings were too scary to acknowledge, let alone verbalise. I would have done almost anything to prove I was straight – and what could be straighter than going on Love Island? So, I gave the producer my number.
They called the next day, while I was wandering around Regent’s Park on one of my extra-long lunch breaks. To my surprise, the man on the other end of the line sounded plausible. He wasn’t a robot or a Nigerian prince. He was a real producer at itv, and he seemed genuinely interested in getting to know me.
He fired off questions that were like flirty prompts on a dating app: what was I like on a night out? How would my exes describe me? What was my go-to chat-up line? Who did I fancy from the last series?’
My performative instincts kicked in. I was fun and flirty! My ex would say I’m a nightmare, but she’d still get back with me! But I think it was my answer to the producer’s final question that sent me to the next round. When he asked why I wanted to go on Love Island, I told him that I genuinely wanted to find love. The statement was true, just not in the way either of us understood it to be.
The producer laughed. I think he found my naivety charming. By the following day, I had an invite for an in-person interview. I left work early for a ‘doctor’s appointment’, crossed the road, slipped into a black Mercedes and sank into its leather seats. This was more like it.
Lewis and his casting team had insisted on calling me a taxi. According to him, the tabloids were so desperate to reveal the season five lineup that they had sent paparazzi to stake out itv Studios – so hopefuls like myself would need to be smuggled in and out of their castings via a secret entrance.
The blacked-out car hummed through the central London traffic, then took a strange turn around the back of a row of grand red-brick offices. Somewhere inside was my golden ticket to Love Island fame.
I might have been the office dogsbody at work, but here I was being made tea by assistants so excited to meet me they insisted on hugging me rather than shaking my hand. I was led into a quiet back room where a camera and tripod had already been set up. I sat down in the casting chair and stared at the blinking red light.
The young producers – Henry and Nikita – smiled their television smiles. ‘So, what’s your best asset?’ ‘How long have you been single?’ ‘What’s your craziest dating story?’ Dutifully, I gave the performance of a lifetime, answering the questions exactly the way they expected me to. By the time the flashing red light went out, I had a brilliant, terrible feeling that I’d knocked the casting out of the park.
After that initial taping, things started moving fast. Over the next two weeks, there were calls, emails, texts, background checks, health forms and endless questionnaires to fill out.
During this period, I ‘followed up with my GP in Chancery Lane’ on at least two more occasions. First, to meet the show’s executive producers – sober, grey-haired suits who grilled me on why I wanted to leave my job behind and become a reality tv personality – and then, for a random drug test and a psychiatric assessment with Dr Sandra Scott, the show’s psychological consultant, who had been brought in as part of itv’s overhauled duty-of-care procedures, following the suicides of former contestants Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon.
With each clandestine meeting, the stakes seemed to get higher. During my visits to itv Studios, I was accompanied at all times by one of the producers, who would chaperone me from the lobby to the holding room to meeting room – and even to the bathroom to complete my piss test (clearly, they weren’t taking any chances on two Love Island hopefuls bumping into each other between auditions).
What I didn’t admit to anyone – especially Dr Scott – was that I was starting to feel peculiar in my day-to-day life. At the office, I kept my distance from my new colleagues and bosses, caught between the intoxicating thrill and the awful burden of keeping my big secret, and spending more time than ever in the bathroom stalls, staring at my phone, waiting to hear back from the telebods.
And the friends and family I did tell about my grand plans for world domination had reacted with a mixture of fear and bemusement. I was a nice boy, with a nice haircut, from south-west London. Iain Stirling would eat me alive!
They’re all just jealous, I told myself. They don’t want you to become a star. They’re afraid you’ll leave them behind. But despite the comforting stories I was telling myself, many of the same doubts and anxieties crossed my mind as I lay awake at night. What if no one fancied me? What would the audience make of me? Was Love Island really the answer to all my problems?
As June drew closer, I mentally prepared to leave my old life behind. Any day now, the producers would announce the opening cast, and I’d be whisked off to Majorca for the media blackout – a mandatory week-long quarantine in a hotel with no access to my phone or the world outside. This pre-villa lockdown was to protect contestants from the media and prepare us for the show.
All through May, I waited and waited for the call to come. Every day was the last day of my normal life. And then the strangest thing happened.
Nothing happened. The life-changing messages stopped as quickly as they started. With series five arriving on British screens in just a few weeks, I reached out to Henry and Nikita – but their replies came slowly, if at all. Maybe they were saving me for Casa Amor. Maybe I’d come in as a show-stopping bombshell. I clung to these thin hopes, even as my dreams of superstardom began folding in on me.
It was a couple of weeks later when I crashed out of that rubbish job. I’d stopped sleeping and started hallucinating on the front desk. After two months of constant stress, my nerves were shot. I was on the verge of a mental breakdown, and the cameras hadn’t even started rolling yet.
When I did get a phone call from someone at itv2, a couple of weeks into the show’s run, it was to thank me for applying and to let me know they couldn’t see a place for me on the current series. By that point, I was too proud – not to mention manic and exhausted – to ask for a better explanation.
I didn’t leave the house in the month of July. The first time I did was to visit my gp, who prescribed me beta blockers and sleeping pills, and instructed me not to apply to any massive reality shows for at least 18 months. But the hardest part was having to avoid the ambient nightly chatter about the new couples in the villa.
Love Island was unavoidable that summer. Series five broke more audience records, and contestants like Molly-Mae Hague, Tommy Fury, Ovie Soko and Maura Higgins went on to become household names in tv land. Not long after the show ended, Amber Gill, one half of the winning couple, had signed a fashion deal worth £1 million, and I’d found a new job that paid slightly above minimum wage.
I never did find out exactly why I didn’t make it onto the island. When I reached out to Lewis – now an executive on the show – he said he couldn’t give specific feedback to hopefuls: ‘There are many moving parts to the casting process, and decisions are based on a range of factors.’
Perhaps he saw through my act all along. Or maybe Dr Scott could sense I was dangerously close to crashing and burning, and staged an intervention.
I stopped thinking about Love Island for a long time after that. I tried to live in the real world – found myself a therapist, got into a loving relationship and even started applying myself in my new job. Eventually, I felt secure enough to start questioning my sexual identity and the things I wanted from my life.
Most importantly, I didn’t have any of these slow, difficult realisations in front of millions of viewers and hundreds of thousands of social media followers. That kind of self-discovery is rarely glamorous, sexy or exciting – and best not attempted on itv2.
