Love Island USA Boss Talks Andrea Dumping Video, Leah’s Mean Tweet, Reunion 5

[This story contains spoilers from the season six finale of Love Island USA.]

Simon Thomas, Love Island USA executive producer and president of ITV Entertainment, may have been on an island this summer. But he definitely wasn’t relaxing. He was bringing this summer’s must-watch reality show to life.

Season six of Peacock‘s beloved dating completion series, filmed in Fiji and hosted by Vanderpump Rules star Ariana Madix, could be one of the most dramatic and surprising seasons of the show’s U.S. iteration. From shocking dumpings that had the villa arguing for weeks to questionable actions in Casa Amor (the ultimate Love Island test), this season had fans flocking to social media to weigh in and share their reactions. And ultimately, Serena Page and Kordell Beckham captured fan’s hearts the most to be named the winners.

“This felt like a group [of Islanders] who were very attractive, but very human and all had something there that was something else and it was magic,” Thomas says about the cast. “You hope for the best and you plan for the worst, and you wait for surprises and that’s what we got.”

But this season also left fans with several unanswered questions, namely involving which girl actually took a “backseat” in the decision to send Andrea Carmona home during that jaw-dropping dumping, as well as why Leah Kateb was led to believe America hated her, even though she was a fan-favorite, amassing more than two million followers on Instagram.

Below, Thomas talks with The Hollywood Reporter about when he knew this season was special, Madix’s first time hosting, why the full video of the decision to dump Andrea hasn’t been released, Leah’s mean tweet, what fans can expect from the reunion show and why it’s “disappointing” when some Islanders spill secrets on social media after getting dumped.

***

What is your reaction to the massive success this season? 

It’s been incredible, right? Like, incredibly mind-blowing. I was talking to my father last night and I said to him, “we’re in the eye of the storm, so I can’t tell right now whether the show isn’t as big as I think” — because everywhere I look it’s Love Island because I’m in the middle of it with my algorithm. So I think it’s really big — or it’s actually much bigger than I realize and I can’t get my head around how big it is, because it seems like there are more people in the universe talking about some of our Islanders than could possibly have watched the show. It’s like this weird feeling but it’s amazing and really nice. 

I’m one of those people who don’t build my personality around ratings performance, because some of my favorite shows didn’t rate and some of my least favorite shows did. I’ve always looked at ratings as like, “oh, we get to do this again.” We were already doing Love Island again [It’s already been renewed for season seven], but I guess we’re probably gonna get to do Love Island a few more times now, maybe? I don’t know, that’s why I’m happy about it. 

You have been with the Love Island franchise and reality TV for some time. When did you realize that you had something special this season?

We have really strong philosophies and beliefs on the show of how to do things. Like how to find the best cast, how to do the social engagement, how to program the show at night, how to play with the format. We have these like tenants that we hold true, and then everything else is a blank page where you go, “Well, what could it be?” We’ve always had that they-will-come mentality, hopefully. But we do that because we’re completely anxious human beings who want to make sure that we’re putting out the best show that we possibly can, and there’s no hubris and we feel like the underdogs and all that jazz, right? So you go into it with this cast having met like 800 odd people, and then you get down to your Top 50, then they meet them in Fiji and they go, “OK, this is our opening lineup,” and you’re watching the tapes of them that they’ve put together … and you’re just nervous, right? They [Islanders] seem really charming and funny and lovely, and they did that wonderful musical opening this year and that was a bunch of fun. 

But I remember during the mock week period where we’re filming the fake show to rehearse the real show with other people who are not Islanders. And there’s two things that occurred to me in that week: I remember standing on the balcony looking down at the pool and seeing the space underneath the deck and thinking to myself, “I guess someone could get under there, but why would they, we’re probably OK.” And then the other thing that occurred to me watching the tapes was there’s something slightly different about this group. I’m not gonna say I was clairvoyant, I didn’t know whether it was good or bad, it just struck me that they all had something else. And I know that from the U.K. learnings and from our learnings, you always want beautiful people with vulnerabilities who can make bad decisions occasionally and all that jazz. But this felt like a group who were very attractive but very human, and all had something there that was something else and it was magic. You hope for the best and you plan for the worst, and you wait for surprises and that’s what we got. 

And you also don’t truly don’t know how the Islanders are going to interact at first in the villa.

When you do something a lot, you don’t even know what you know anymore, right? So you’re doing things because that’s the way you do them, but it’s actually informed by all the knowledge. And I think that from day one, Sharon Vuong, at the network, and [showrunner] Ben Thursby-Palmer on the show and myself and the team, we’ve always wanted friends. That’s one of our core tenants, that you wanna spend time with these people. And I think that’s so telling, and I think that because we’re not cynical — we don’t cast for conflict, we don’t cast for drama, we don’t cast people who are gonna mix it up, right? You cast for people who are vulnerable and human and have interesting quirks that may mix with other people with interesting quirks. So you hope, but yeah, I guess we want to be friends with them and that’s good enough and we’ll see, and, you know, we saw. 

What was it like having Ariana Madix as the new host? Do you think she brought a new audience with her? 

We love her. People love her, like people love her in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen. And that means they come to things for her. Like it’s a big step to go, “I really like this Bravo docuseries [Vanderpump Rules] with this drama on it, so I’m gonna follow that person to host another show maybe once a week for the entire summer.” Like, “I’m gonna dedicate 40 odd hours of my life to this because this person’s on it once a week.” But it certainly brought people and I think that because of who she is and her own stories. That audience and our audience made sense. And so it raised it up and I think that massively helped. She was a big part of the puzzle, and the show would have felt like less if she hadn’t been there. 

Can we expect to see Madix return as host next season?

I hope so. I mean, I hope she still feels like that. I think she does. I think she had a good time. She’s great, she’s the queen of the villa. 

Looking back at one of the most dramatic moments this season, when the girls’ voted to send Andrea home, what was it like behind the scenes? I know Rob Rausch was considering sending himself home as well that night.

This is a classic thing that we’ve done, since I’d say Big Brother, like 20 years ago, right? So watching that live is not hugely different than watching it at home, because Love Island is a fairly raw show that we sometimes amp the music up in the drama as we go to break or at the end of a scene. But realistically, that livestream that we’re recording is then truncated. And when it’s dramatic like that and messy, just playing it is the best thing you can do. So there’s not oodles of footage there that didn’t necessarily make the cut. But the feeling that you had watching is the feeling that happens in the control [room] when you don’t know what’s happening. You don’t know what’s gonna happen next.

I think my philosophy is always, if somebody truly wants to leave a show, they should leave because if they’ve been dominating the show, we should not be afraid that they are gone because someone else will fill that space. I’m not afraid of that. I hate producers out there who think they have to protect a cast to retain that same thing. It’s like producing out of fear. So we don’t do that. But what I would say is we try not to let people make rash decisions in the moment. We would never want somebody to say at 10 p.m. at night, “I wanna leave the villa” and then let them leave. They absolutely could, you cannot stop somebody from leaving — that would be firstly, illegal. But we talk to people and we say: Sleep on it. Because part of our duty of care is to make sure people don’t leave with massive regrets. And we want them to be vulnerable and to be present in the moment and to feel those feelings and feel like they want to leave and all that jazz, but then not wake up in the morning and be like, “What am I doing?” … I think he [Rob] feels like he made the right call right in the end, didn’t shorten his experience. … And frankly if someone really, really wants to leave and they leave, like, it’s good television as well — can’t really go wrong. 

It’s just tricky and letting them find their space and perspective because it’s a world where they can lose their perspective. They are living and breathing this show in a way that none of us are, so they need a moment to be like, “Oh, actually, no. I think I should probably ride this out.” 

Many fans have called for the release of the full video showing the girls’ conversation about deciding to send Andrea home, and some were hoping it would be shown on movie night. Is there a reason it hasn’t been shared yet, and is it something fans could potentially see at the reunion?

It’s a couple different things. We record several cameras, right? Like of that 90 cameras, we only record like a dozen. So in the moment, you’ve got coverage that disappears, never seen again. And now that dozen that’s recorded, we have a rolling period where we then delete that footage to keep the [hard] drives free. So you retain what was brought down for the episode. But like, Aaron having a bowl of cereal just goes. And it’s not selective, it’s just like if it didn’t make the cut. So what still exists on hard drives, I’m not 100 percent sure. I think it’s something that we’re definitely gonna look at to see whether we still have coverage of it and whether that coverage is clarifying because ultimately, as you see in the shots, you can’t tell what they’re counting because it’s framed that way. They would have had conversations about it and producers would have been like, “Ok, which way are you gonna go?” But I don’t know what exists. So there are people reviewing the receipts as we speak. 

Of the post-show, Leah is now like the most famous person in the world. Like this moment has become one of their [Leah fans] holy relics of a fandom, right? Was she fairly or unfairly treated coming out of this sequence? So I hope we have something maybe that could be of use to the conversation. 

But here’s the other thing I would say with the reunion — I think we want to satisfy any questions that the audience still has lingering from the show. I think we wanna go over that stuff, but I think what’s more interesting, hopefully, we wanna give people what they want. … So with the reunion, we wanna give people what they want, and go over our favorite moments of the show and get into that nitty gritty, and any anything that hasn’t been covered to death we should cover, but we should also probably not like relitigate or like just redo movie night. I think what we want to do with the drama and the people here is find out where they are now. … And be like, OK, so where are you all, how do you feel about this, this thing was said on Call Her Daddy [podcast], what do you think about that?  I think that’s the next step because now they’ve seen it all, they’ve discussed it, they’ve done the fun things. Well, now what? 

Some fans were also upset that Leah, who’s a fan favorite, only had mean tweets about her during the social media challenge. Was there a strategy behind choosing those specific tweets?

It’s like you pull the tweets that are the funniest and the most provocative. And then you put them in and then you have to edit the show down. So then you show the ones that are most performative and then through reduction, suddenly it feels like maybe these were a little bit too focused on this because of the way you’ve reduced it, not because of what was there. So no, it wasn’t strategy. It’s also like, people want drama and fun and to have a good time, right? It’s the same people who are like, you need to get rid of whomever from the show and you’re like, OK, so that person could go and then what? Then you would miss them. You are booing them because you like to watch them on television so you can boo them. And I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing with Leah at all. It’s just those happen to be the tweets that were either the most funny or entertaining or story-provoking. It was not a targeted thing. 

That’s a good point — even though you may hate someone on the show, you still return to watch the drama unfold.

That’s why the vote works the way that it does. We’re not Big Brother, it’s not a vote to evict. It’s not like, send home the one you hate. It’s like no, vote for the couple that you love, the couple that you think has the best connection, the Islander that you love the most. Then you get this bottom grouping and then the Islanders do it, and that’s better, because now the Islanders are responsible for their own fate. And then they were all pointing at Leah because of Andrea going home. Now, if we just sent the lowest person home, everyone would cry. They can’t blame America in there, but they can blame each other. You’re just trying to do the thing that’s the most fun. 

From beginning to end, could you all as producers predict who the frontrunners were this season to win, or was it even hard from your standpoint? 

Normally we have a sense relatively early on. I think, classically, some couples have formed and then stayed, right? And that doesn’t mean you’re always gonna win. It’s just you start to get see front runners or whatever and then we have polls, like [on] the app. So you can kind of see viewer sentiment the whole way through. This year more than ever, we had no idea how this was gonna shake out. I think up until like post-Serena getting her steps in, as Ariana said, I don’t think we could have said this is who’s gonna win this show and that’s wild, and that’s fantastic. What an ensemble to not know who your star is. Like you had people early on, and sometimes it did feel like Rob Island, but I never was like, “Well, cool. He’s gonna win.” Every time they surprised me. 

A handful of Islanders who were dumped from the villa quickly took to their social media to share their honest thoughts, namely Caine Bacon. Is that frowned upon, and if so, how do you handle those situations?

I hate when people pretend the thing that’s happening is not actually happening. So to talk plainly about it, you know, Caine gets on TikTok, just like goes for it. And so you reach out to Caine and say, “Hey, mate. Firstly, you’re not supposed to talk about production but, secondly, let’s just keep some mystery to it.” I had a conversation with a colleague yesterday that was both edifying and disappointing because they had a conversation with their 16-year-old daughter because all of her friends had turned up at their house because they knew their mom worked on the show. And they were like, “Is it true that they go around the back and they vape sometimes? Ew, it’s gross.” … I was disappointed because I was like, no, you want to keep the mystery. I don’t wanna know who smokes, like it’s a hyperreal world of our creation. 

We think that the Islanders should come out, they have their truth. It is not always the same thing that we agree with, like, we have different versions of events. We have tape sometimes that contradicts what they might say. But if I was afraid of what an Islander was gonna say in on a TikTok, then I’ve probably been doing something wrong along the way. That’s the truth. The only time I get worried is if they say something I don’t fundamentally agree with, but I think it might not look right. They also have a right to go out and earn their money and make their moment happen from this, and so they should. … So we’re aware of it. I think we try and talk to them about where it doesn’t actually benefit them, [and] there’s things in their contract they shouldn’t talk about. But for the most part, I don’t want to go to war with Islanders. I don’t want to, it’s just part of fun. 

With all the momentum you built this season, how do you keep that going for next year?

We are conscious of a few different things. I always love when you want a little more, so I think the length of the show is really good. I also like on any particular night when one episode is too long, it’s like, I think you just want a little bit more. So next steps is, we get through reunion. Hopefully, we make that worthy of everyone’s time and the effort and emotion they put into the show. We come back next year and we pray for the Love Island gods that they continue to smile on us the way that they did this year. They are fickle, I don’t know how it will go. But I’m sure we’ll try our best, and we just gotta try and keep doing what we’ve always done. 

We’re just continuing to know what we think works better and be open to changing our minds, and so we’ll just continue with that. We don’t wanna overdo it and overexpose the show and suddenly it’s not special anymore. But I also think that Love Island Games prove that you can have more Love Island than just the 40 hours in the summer. I think that there is room for that. And frankly, this cast I think is a really fascinating group of people and I’m sure we’ll see them again elsewhere. … I think maybe there’s something there but you know, Peacock has to have slots and a desire to do more and we have to have a smart and clever and fun way, which is worthy of everyone’s time and not cynical. So we’ll start with the reunion and we’ll go from there and if not, I’ll just keep watching their TikToks and it’s fine. 

Fans have also been calling for a Love Island USA spinoff with Serena, Leah and JaNa [Craig], aka PPG. Are there any ideas being thrown around or anything in the work with that?

I would love to see the three of them again. I think that what a great group of people, what great different personalities and character. think they are not obviously best friends, right? They are a great collective who support each other really well. And then I think outside of the PPG, like Liv [Walker] is such a flavor with that group as well because Liv is your best mate who’s fighting for you, even when you don’t want to fight for yourself anymore, like she cannot not. Like what a great person to have with you on your side. And Kaylor [Martin] is there wearing her heart on her sleeve and probably crying in the bathroom occasionally. But there are such a great group of girls, period. Fantastic. But JaNa, Serena and Leah – one in a million kind of friendship [on the show]. So the three of them, yeah, I hope we see them again. … And at the very least, I’ll drag them to Fiji for Aftersun next year. 

Can you tease fans about what they can expect with the upcoming reunion episode on Aug. 19?

I don’t think there’s anything I can say that’s gonna make anyone more excited for that reunion than simply following them all on TikTok and Instagram, because that’s the thing that’s making me excited about the reunion, you know what I mean? When you pitch these shows and you hope for them to come together, you’re like, oh, I hope there’s something to talk about. And I’m like, well, it’s Thursday, finale feels like it was 100 years ago. I’ve got a million things that I wanna talk to them about. I’m excited to see it. And we’re only four days away from the finale [which was on July 21]. Imagine once we get to three more weeks [when the reunion airs], I think it’s gonna be great. And I can’t wait to spend more time with my friends on television. 

Season six of Love Island USA is currently streaming on Peacock.