Not every Vogue cover story starts on a podium at G-A-Y Late, Soho’s least underground gay bar, clutching £3 tequila sodas and dancing to euphoric pop girlies, but Maya Jama is nothing if not game. She’s game to meet by the Spice Girls staircase at London’s St Pancras Renaissance Hotel (“I was always Scary Spice, because she was the wildest”). She’s game to try her first ever Martini (she takes one sip, grimaces, and taps out). She’s game for no-holds-barred dinner chat (racism in Britain is quite the appetiser, but a second later she’ll be talking about learning to drive: “If you live in London, there’s not much point. Like, where the f**k do you even park?”).
At quarter to maybe-we-should-wrap-this-up, she hails us a cab to Soho and before we know it we’ve been frisked by security and are bobbing happily in a sea of plastic-cup-carrying gays. She says people don’t usually recognise her “until I speak”, on account of her radio voice, but we’re repeatedly approached in the cordoned-off smoking area where she’s all politeness and chat. Chat, we both agree in the fug of smoke, is Maya’s superpower.
Jama and I are meeting ostensibly because Love Island – that jambalaya of testosterone, loyalty, weaponised charisma and pool-safe opaque white goblets – is currently sweltering through its 10th series (it’s her second time as presenter). Though to reduce the Jama Effect to her work on Britain’s most deliciously divisive summer-flinging reality juggernaut is to perhaps miss the point. Not since the 1980s heyday of Paula Yates has light entertainment produced such a lightning rod of It-girl magic, an everywhere-ness that transcends the worlds of television, radio, music and celebrity. And now, of course, fashion has fallen for her too.
Well, she’s a Vogue cover girl. “I was just pinching myself the whole time,” says the 28-year-old in that near-gravel rasp of hers, of heading to New York to be photographed by Steven Meisel for this shoot a few weeks ago. “I didn’t sleep.” The legendary image-maker – a one-man barometer of beauty – is as enamoured with Maya as the rest of us. Immediately I see why. I’m Friday-night exhausted, but her company is invigorating, almost adrenal. A heady mix of wingwoman – “Get the bill… and just one more wine” – and trusty BFF keeping you centred. “I will never leave someone in a bad situation,” she says, “but if you’ve exhausted your options, I’m not silly.” She’s part gobby ladette (“I Deliveroo my Tesco like a prick”), part trusted confidante. I find myself willing to confess things I would hesitate to tell my therapist. Nothing is deliberate or forced. She is being Maya rather than doing Maya.
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Brands are also falling head over heels for her. She is the newly anointed campaign star for Dolce & Gabbana, in addition to her work as the face of Rimmel London and modelling for the likes of Self-Portrait. Don’t fret, though, these desirable placements haven’t gone to her head; the online commentary keeps her grounded. “I always thought my teeth were all right, never blinked an eye, and then I read a tweet saying, ‘I really love that Maya’s kept her natural teeth and not fixed them.’”
In the meantime, her second outing presenting Love Island is streaming to millions. No other TV proposition better encapsulates that hazy feeling of summer lovin’, not to mention so many Gen Z aspirations, yet it’s been a rocky climb for ITV2’s flagship show, which over its lifespan has survived accusations of racism, ageism, misogyny and on-screen bullying. Scrutiny intensified when two former contestants died by suicide, as did its original presenter Caroline Flack, albeit in circumstances unrelated to the show, in 2020. Depending on your position, Love Island is either light entertainment or the end of civilisation.
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Contestant body types tend to be almost archaic: Barbie for women and King Triton for men. Does Jama think the show needs more diversity? “I don’t know. I always want to watch any show and be like, ‘There’s someone from everywhere.’” Whatever the casting they always get complaints, she adds. “You can’t please everybody.” With her own traditionally hot physique, would she go on as a competitor? “I would not be able to, at any age, strut out of the house in a bikini in front of men that are judging me based on just one sentence and what I look like. The confidence of the people that go on! They’ve got a different kind of juice.”
With as many as 100,000 applicants a year, Love Island has taken Jama to the cutting edge of superstardom. Lads’ fave, girls’ girl, RuPaul’s Drag Race UK guest judge – can she surmise her allure? “I’ve never met a prick from Bristol,” she says, answering without quite answering. “We’re really good people, and it’s a weird balance between still being a city but everyone’s entwined. A big sense of community.”
She’s a fantasy of sorts. It’s this palpable feeling of an exceptionally hot woman who you might just be friends with, who you might just have a chance with. She oozes ease: “My friends take the piss, saying, ‘She’s the people’s princess,’” she says, cracking up. “Can you imagine? I wouldn’t last a day.” She thinks about it some more. “The people that do really like me, I feel like they see a bit of themselves in me. And then the other people are like, ‘Who the f**k is this bitch and what does she even do?’”
A week earlier we meet for lunch at The Twenty Two, a members’ club and hotel in Mayfair. For someone who’s amassed a lot of column inches, Maya has only given a handful of interviews like this. She’s hot off a flight from Shanghai “for a hol because I’ve only ever seen China in films”. I’m acutely aware how first impressions of women get reported in magazines: “She saunters in looking dazzling in jeans and not a scrap of make-up.” But Maya saunters in to lunch looking dazzling in jeans and not a scrap of make-up. Her style is always characteristically body-confident: she’s as at home in a Prada vest and joggers as she is in wet-draped tangerine trompe-l’oeil mesh. Today, it’s a long-sleeved crop top and boot-cut denim ensemble in the dustiest of beiges. Her beauty regime – glimpsed on her Instagram Stories and regurgitated on the Sidebar of Shame – is a blend of lymphatic drainages, bin bag saunas, Shane Cooper aqua facials and her own Mij Masks. A glam team awaits her upstairs for a post-lunch event, but I’ve half a mind to tell them to go home – our girl is good to go.
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We agree upon two tuna niçoise salads and two fries, and jokingly dither over a £2,000 bottle of wine with the waiter but Maya tells him, “Everything tastes the same after two sips,” so we opt for something a bracket above house white. Two sips down and we’re chatting again. Last week, Maya was shooting the Dolce campaign, which she gives me a sneak peek of on her phone. In the Meisel images, she’s red-headed, her curves poured into sequins and lingerie while she lounges on a high-gloss chaise. “I’m a non-model. I just extra smized,” she says. Has she always had that bod? She tells me she was “not even considered remotely hot my whole school years”.
But let’s go back further. She’s half Somali, half Swedish (the only Swedish phrases she has memorised are: “What’s your name?”, “Do you want to go home now?” and “Can I stroke your dog?”). When she was 12, she cut all communication with her father, who had been in and out of prison since she was three. The decision to sever ties came from an accumulation of understanding, rather than a single event: “I was just old enough to kind of gather my own opinion.” I tell her I stopped speaking to my own dad at roughly the same age and the tables flip: she’s interviewing me. “Can I ask you a question? One of my really deep friends who goes to therapy said that she thinks the reason why I’m so able to cut off relationships with certain people is because I cut off one with my dad at such a young age. And having that experience is like, if I can cut off my own blood it’s easier to cut off people now as an adult. Do you think that?” Suddenly she’s in my psyche, making me nit-comb my relationships with the men in my life, questioning those I’ve stepped away from since severance with my father, wondering if every male relationship is doomed to follow that same fateful path. (When I look back at the transcript later I see that I simply said “wow” in response.)
She hasn’t had a particularly easy time. When she was 16, living in Bristol, her then boyfriend was killed by a ricocheting bullet during a pub fight. She moved to London in a cloud of grief and hasn’t lived back in her home city since. How did she handle such a tragedy? “I don’t like people feeling sorry for me,” she replies. She clearly doesn’t want to dwell on what happened. It made her resilient, and she tells herself that no pain is forever. At the time, she felt most comfortable speaking to other people who’d experienced similar grief. She learnt: “It’s going to be bad and there’s nothing you can do to not make it bad. But it’s going to be less bad later.”
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People like Maya because she’s tough and vulnerable. “When you’ve been working for so long it gives you a sense of purpose,” she says. She’s been grafting non-stop since 16 and “didn’t take a day off” for years, terrified she’d miss out on that first domino that leads to a big break. “As you’re coming up, you just do anything that involves a microphone and talking.” She grew up watching “Nick Grimshaw and Jameela [Jamil] and everyone like that… Miquita [Oliver], June Sarpong.” But Big Brother’s “Davina [McCall] was my absolute girl.” Surprisingly, she’s never seen the Davina-fronted dating show Streetmate, an analogue, turn-of-the-millennium great-grandparent to Love Island. Where McCall scuttled round our UK cities cupid-ing people on live TV, the islanders now simply get a text. Is Jama game to street-meet potential suitors herself?
There’s a misconception about how much she dates because she’s linked to every man she’s photographed within touching distance of. As she says this we simultaneously look out of the restaurant window for potential paparazzi, and I do my best “pictured with mystery man” face. How does she handle the rabid interest in her personal life, which might see her linked to Leonardo DiCaprio one week, Drake the next? “At the end of the day, I am a TV host. I’m a presenter, I’m not a reality star. I’m not someone that puts all my business out there. I’ve never really offered up my personal life, I’ve just done my job and that’s kind of come with it. So I think I do have a right to keep some bits private.”
Do they print a lot of untruths, then? She doesn’t want to be too precious about it.“I do love a party. I am super boisterous and a bit gross and not that classy. My number one rule is don’t look at comments, but I had a relapse. Maybe it’s because you don’t have to show your photo, or you don’t have to show your name, but there is just this huge, huge community of people that are just f**king horrible, horrible people. And they all combine in this little space and they believe everything they read and they think everyone’s disgusting. I got called something like ‘broken home bitch’. Yeah,” she says, looking me dead in the eyes. “Broken home bitch.”
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We both know it’s an awful thing to say, that years of patriarchy and internet anonymity allow the worst kinds of behaviours to flourish online. Yet we can’t help absolutely howling with laughter. You shouldn’t have looked, I say, between violent cackles. You broke your own rule. “Maybe that’s a bit of my problem though,” she says. “I don’t give a f**k most of the time. But then a little bit I do.”
It would, at this point, be downright negligent of me not to ask Ms Love Island herself about love. There was the called-off engagement with Ben Simmons, an Australian basketball player, last year, though the public’s deepest fascination still lies with her ex-boyfriend, the rapper Stormzy. The pair were an instant poster couple, a flagship partnership that reflected youthful hope in the aftermath of the racially tense Brexit vote. Their public acceptance felt invigorating, two kids from immigrant families done good. “None of us really knew the level of importance it held to a certain group of people, us being together,” she reflects. “We were both super ambitious. We were both from similar upbringings and we were both just little grafters that have made something good of ourselves.”
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High-profile relationships can cast a very long shadow. How has stepping out of that felt? “It was lovely when it was lovely, and then you move,” she says without a hint of malice or even regret. But their races were a factor too; Maya and Stormzy looked like thousands of under-represented Britons across the country. “[I keep thinking] we’ve come on leaps and bounds,” she says, “but then someone will tell you their experience and you realise we’re still super far back.” How did a mixed-parentage, multicultural upbringing shape her? “[It] wasn’t really a discussion,” she says, shrugging. “You know how you see those online think pieces like, ‘Discovering who you are’ and ‘How I found myself’ and I’m like, ‘I knew who I was when I was two.’”
As our starters arrived earlier, Maya – an astrology devotee – talked about her “Scorpio moon” tendencies: “Yeah, I’ve got that harshness. I don’t want revenge, I just want you to always feel like, ‘I’m so f**king sad I’ve lost them.’ You’re going to miss my presence based on my absence.” This is a woman who loves unapologetically hard and when it’s time to move on she moves on. Break-ups can sting for a long time, what’s her prescription? “The best thing you can do is try and do everything that made you happy before you met them.” Does she still want love? “Yeah. Actual love. That’s all I ever want. Just real love. I want a best friend that I’m in love with. And I have had that before.”
Three weeks later, when I wake up with a G-A-Y stamp on my forearm and a tequila headache, I am reflecting on the Jama Effect when I get a text. It’s a picture of Jama in the back of a car, looking, dare I say it, quite resplendent en route to Cannes. Despite a night on the tiles, despite that wee-hours cab home, she looks like a million-dollar bill. The thing is with Maya, even when she’s hanging, she still looks banging.
Hair: Guido. Colourist: Suite Caroline. Make-up: Pat McGrath. Nails: Jin Soon Choi. Production: Prodn. Digital artwork: Dtouch
The August 2023 issue of British Vogue is on newsstands from Tuesday 18 July
