Maya Jama, the freshly appointed host of Love Island, ITV2’s international sensation of a dating show (peak viewership in 2022 5.5 million with more than 269 million streams), has been practising her slo-mo walk: the swaggering, portentous tracking shot that heralds the host’s arrival into the villa.
“I am shy about that walk,” she says. “It’s big, isn’t it, the slow-motion walk? Me and my girlfriends, we were drunk, doing the walk, up and down the hall. Tried the sexy version. Tried the smiley version.” And? “Smiley version won.”
Can you believe you’re going to do it for real, I say. We meet a week before Jama is due to film the promotional idents for the winter show (“I’m still undecided what I’m going to wear”), barely a month before the show itself kicks off on January 16.
“Oh my God, I know! Mad. First day, series one, I was a fan; sitting there, watching it, commentating at my house, all these opinions. This couple, that couple, that one should be with that one, la la la!”
Did she think during those early viewings, “I want to do that!”? Was it on her vision board? Did Jama manifest herself the Love Island role? (Jama is 28: key demographic for both manifestation and vision boards.) “No! I’ve never really known what the end goal was. Just wanted to do fun things on telly.”
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She and I are sitting in the bar of a nice, discreet hotel in central London on a very cold day (minus two degrees, which hasn’t prevented Jama from wearing a crop top with her Loewe patch jeans). She is very tall and very gorgeous, garrulous, open, fun. Your best-case scenario primetime telly star, really high energy and effortless eye contact — but Jama’s is no brittle performance of likeability designed to make the public adore her and commissioners hire her. She’s the real deal.
Which is fortunate, because her hiring as Love Island linchpin, a stern headmistress/big sister to the contestants and their endless rollicking dramas, will bring her a level of fame she hasn’t yet experienced. Jama has done Radio 1, MTV, Channel 4; she’s had a relationship that invited public interest (more on this shortly). But none of that compares with “Love Island Fame”, which exists in a category of its own; as problematic and overwhelming as it is gilded, associated with heavy trolling (reference Laura Whitmore, whom Jama replaces) and (desperately sadly, in the case of the original host, Caroline Flack) out-and-out tragedy. Then there have been the accusations that the show doesn’t provide sufficient mental health support for its contestants. (“They go in with one life and come out with a completely different one. ITV looks after them, there’s a lot of help,” Jama says.)
It takes authenticity and a ferocious sense of self to weather that storm. How did she come by the gig (if she didn’t manifest it)? Audition?
“No. Hmmm . . . How did I? Once you start doing TV, you meet a lot of producers, through different shows, and the heads will be aware of talent . . . That’s weird, to call yourself talent, isn’t it? I talk for a living. It’s not exactly tap dancing everywhere or performing a ballad. So I think I’ve always been in their eye line, but I was super young when the presenter shifts were happening in the past. They knew about me but I was always a bit too young, and obviously, there were previous hosts anyway. Then, this year, I got a phone call while I was in America.”
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Working? “Having some time off. In previous years I’ve literally worked every single day, Sundays, done all the jobs I could get, but, at the beginning of 2022, I said, ‘You know what? I’ve done loads now, let me just give myself a bit of time to have a personal life, get away from it for a bit, then come back and work again.’ In that time-off period, I got the phone call saying, ‘Love Island wanna meet you.’ Or, they offered it to me straight away? Or ‘They’re in discussions’? I’m trying to think! Anyway, I didn’t have to audition.”
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Did she say yes immediately? “Straight away! Of course! Golden ticket.”
Who was the first person she told? “My best friend Shannon, who I went to school with. She’s a trainee teacher. She was just like, ‘F***ing hell, Miriam …’ She calls me Miriam. She gave me a fake name ages ago, so that she could shout my name and no one would turn around in Bristol. She was like, ‘That’s not a surprise — but f*** me!’ ”
There is a sense of inevitability associated with the ascent of Maya Jama. She was born and brought up in Bristol (she has a trace of the accent still but nothing more. “I wish I’d kept it, to be honest. My accent always flowed with who I was around. I could chameleon”). For as long as she can remember, she really wanted to be on telly.
“There are videos of me as a child being, like, ‘I wanna be on telly! I wanna do the news, or be on EastEnders!’ ”
Why? “I just liked it. I couldn’t sing. I could dance a little bit, but I wasn’t good enough to be a professional. I liked the whole feel behind [TV], the glamour of it. And the fun. The fun of: that doesn’t even feel like a real job! How is that a job? You go, you talk to people, you have a laugh on TV, you speak about stuff you like, and that’s the job?”
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● Watch: Maya Jama talks Tiger King and self-isolation
She was, she says, ambitious. “Really ambitious. I was super, super confident as a child and a teenager. As I’ve got older, I’ve got more shy, which is weird. I think it’s that as you get older, you learn more about life, you’re less naive, you have more letdowns and that stuff. I’m not as confident and I’m not as ballsy as I was when I was a teenager. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, so I’d go all guns blazing. Now — oh, there’s a lot to lose. I don’t wanna say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing.”
Aged just 16, without any training or contacts, Jama moved from Bristol to London to try her luck. She moved in with a relative, got a part-time job at Urban Outfitters and started interning as a runner for a production company called Jump Off TV. In a matter of months, Jump Off TV gave her an on-screen presenting role. Jama said it never occurred to her that she couldn’t do it. “I was fearless. I think it’s the background I come from.”
She did not have an easy childhood. Her father, Hussein, from whom she is estranged, was in and out of prison; her first boyfriend, Rico Gordon, was shot and killed when she was 16. Did that make her strong?
“I hate the word ‘strong’, because why do you always have to be strong? But I’m resilient. There’s no manual on it, is there? If you don’t grow up with your dad around that much, you don’t know any different.” As for the murder of her boyfriend: “I try and steer away from it. I spoke a lot about it when I was first coming up, but now I don’t like to talk about it. It brings a lot back for his family.” Jama will say something similar when I ask about Caroline Flack: that this is not her grief to trade upon in the interest of publicity. Fair enough.
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Even after she got to London, as she was laying the foundations of her TV career, things were not easy for Jama. “I was broke, pretending I’d lost my Oyster card every day so I could get to work,” she says. “Hustling my little way around London, having £1 chicken-shop meals every day. But I was happy. I was working and I was living in London, I felt like I was getting somewhere. I’d just work as much as I could.”
Maya Jama is not given to self-pity, by all accounts.
The breaks came to her thick and fast — “sooner than I imagined” — first, DJing on Rinse FM, next presenting for MTV (she’d buy stuff to wear on screen from Topshop and “take it back the next day. I was the queen of that. Just don’t sweat in it. I’d put talcum powder on my armpits. It was stressful”), then DJing on Radio 1. “I was only 22! I remember speaking to my manager at the time: ‘I don’t think I’m ready for this. I’m just little me going on this huge thing. But I’m gonna go anyway!’ ”
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In 2015 she began a relationship with the then unknown musician Stormzy. “We were so young when we met, just beginning our careers. I was starting at MTV. He’d not even released a single at that point. We were just little babies.”
Nonetheless, Jama was conscious that this relationship could come to dominate her career if she wasn’t careful, distracting from her own work, rendering her a plus one, a professional girlfriend. “I’m not naive to the fact that when you are a woman in the industry, most of the things that people want to talk about are your relationships. It’s different for men. I’d seen that happen to other people. I don’t think either of us knew it was going to be such a big thing. We were just: we’re young and in love and we’re going to go for it and work really hard. We’re just together. We never really did red carpets. We didn’t do any of that stuff.”
The relationship ended in 2019, so amicably that, when the two were seen having a fine old time in each other’s company at November’s MTV awards, everyone assumed they were back together, an assumption born slightly of wish fulfilment — Stormzy and Jama are one of those rare celebrity couples we, their adoring public, are really attached to.
But, no, Jama says. “I’m really, really single right now. Newly single. It’s only been a month . . . [until recently she was in a relationship with the Australian basketball star Ben Simmons] . . . but it’s nice.”
Has she got her eye on anyone? “No!” Historically, she’s a serial monogamist, she says: “Always in long relationships.” She has never cheated on anyone: “I’m not a player”; never been cheated on: “Not that I know of, but you never know, do you?”; and she’s not on the apps. “No!”
Has she ever been? “Once when I was like, 18. Went on Tinder for a night at a sleepover. All of us downloaded it, waited until we matched somebody, deleted it the next day.”
Which (sort of) brings us back to the subject of Love Island. She says she hasn’t yet worked out an overarching wardrobe concept, though her stylist is on it. “It’s South Africa, so it’s hot. It’s hard, because you’ve got to look fun, relatable — but then, you also want to look a bit sexy, don’t you? It’s a sexy role.”
Channel the look of (last season winner) Ekin-Su, I suggest. “Well, she’s a Leo. I’m a Leo.” So am I! “Oh, we love the drama, Leos! And love! We also love love. I think I would have been her best mate [if they’d been on the show together], if [not] doing what she was up to as well!”
Which raises an interesting point: in a different life, might Maya Jama have been a contestant on Love Island? “At 24 — no. At 18, I probably would’ve gone on it. I would’ve been like, ‘Hi, I’m Maya from Bristol — and I’m here for a f***ing laugh.’ ”
Hair: Amidat Giwa at Bryant Artists. Make-up: Letitia Sophia. Nails: Sabrina Gayle at Arch Agency using Essie. Set design: Tobias Blackmore
Love Island starts on ITV2 and ITVX on January 16
