Everyone's in LOVE With Love!

The Love Island USA cast is back on American soil and ready to talk! Their first stop? Us Weekly, to pull back the curtain on summer's hottest show

- by SARAH HEARON

We got a text! Less than 24 hours after they departed the Love Island USA villa in Fiji, the remaining stars of Peacock’s superhit — including winners Amaya Espinal and Bryan Arenales — used their newly returned phones to talk to Us. The reality series followed sexy singles “coupling up” and competing in steamy challenges all to avoid being “dumped” by viewers and castmates.

The eight Islanders — Amaya, 25, and Bryan, 28; Nic Vansteenberghe, 24, and Olandria Carthen, 27; Chris Seeley, 27, and Huda Mustafa, 24; and Iris Kendall, 25, and Pepe Garcia-Gonzalez, 27 — had just spent up to six weeks being followed by 115 cameras, with no access to the internet or outside world. They were watched by millions of viewers six days a week in nearly real time — editors turned episodes around in less than 24 hours — and the show clocked a staggering 1.2 billion minutes streamed for the first nine episodes alone.

Before we dive in, some key takeaways from our chat with the Islanders: Yes, Amaya really does speak in mixed metaphors without hesitation. (“We are not playing math here. We’re not going to subtract and make ourselves smaller!” she tells Us five minutes into her joint interview with Bryan.) No, Nic and Olandria, a.k.a. “Nicolandria,” were not producer plants. And yes, the cast really did eat pancakes every single day (season 7 went through 130 boxes of mix).

Read on for what else they told Us about the hard work of being an Islander, what you didn’t see on camera, what viewers got wrong and where they go from here.

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