Why Maura Higgins Is the Blueprint Hall of Fame Islander

For reality TV fans, it's hard to remember a time when Love Island didn't dominate summer—or pop culture, for that matter. Since the dating show launched in the U.K. in 2015, with the U.S. version spinning off and debuting in 2019, it's become a full-blown, appointment-viewing phenomenon. The show, which airs on ITV2 in the U.K. and Peacock in the U.S., has launched bona fide stars, introduced phrases into the lexicon, inspired countless memes, and its near-real-time release schedule has made it unique in form—all of which contributed to the seventh season of Love Island USA to become the most-streamed show on TV.

This year, fans will need to make time between watching LIUSA and LIUK because a different kind of bombshell is set to arrive: The first-ever Love Island book. Titled Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island, the nonfiction release from Vanity Fair contributing editor Anna Peele explores how the reality show is made behind the scenes and what has led to its international success. Compiled with over 100 interviews with cast members, producers, and experts, it marks the most comprehensive deep dive to date of the reality hit we can't stop watching.

As Enter the Villa hits shelves on May 19, below, read an exclusive excerpt about the appeal of LIUK season 5 breakout star Maura Higgins, who's gone on to host the aftershow Aftersun and compete on The Traitors. In it, Higgins herself weighs in on how she feels now about the iconic moment in which she stood up to Tom Walker.

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Maura Higgins’s star power was obvious to her castmates before she walked into the Villa; well before their season, Curtis [Pritchard] DMed Maura when he was pro on Dancing with the Stars Ireland and she was a local hottie. The twenty-eight-year-old Monster Energy event model came into the Villa on day ten after producers told her she had the personality to be a bombshell. Though Tommy [Fury] and Molly-Mae [Hague] were already a tight couple, Maura made her intentions for Tommy clear as soon as she stepped into the Villa, announced he gave her "fanny flutters," and went on a date with him as Molly-Mae watched from the balcony. Molly-Mae was aggravated to her emotional peak, whisper-shouting in annoyance to the other women.

After the date, Maura told Molly-Mae she was freezing, and Molly-Mae reverted to a more typical mode of operation: killing descension with kindness and co-opting the threat with fashion by offering Maura her jacket—which meant Maura was wearing the white leather moto when she pulled Tommy for a chat in front of Molly-Mae. Maura’s brazen interest in Tommy and her lack of intimidation at Molly-Mae’s presence activated Molly-Mae’s normally fluster-proof personality.

Molly-Mae was understanding on paper if not in practice, in that she recognized that, technically, it was Tommy’s decision whom he pursued, and Maura was doing her job. “A bombshell has every right to come in and just do your thing. That’s what you’re there to do,” Maura says. Molly-Mae became much more understanding when she realized Tommy was obsessed with her; even during the conversation with Maura where she flirted with him in Molly-Mae’s clothing, he’d kept looking over at Molly-Mae with a look that registered somewhere between longing and extreme anxiety about pissing her off.

After Tommy let down Maura, the two women became close. “We couldn’t deny our friendship,” Maura says. “We just got on so well, so all of that stuff, it never affected us.” Maura moved on to Tom Walker, a twenty-nine-year-old model who was youthfully handsome and immature, and whose mouth would soon get him in trouble.

In a scene that would become indelible, Maura was surprised to learn her fellow Islanders had chosen for her to a date with Tom in the Hideaway after they’d known each other only for a few days. “I really didn’t wanna go in there with him,” Maura says now, reflecting on the situation. “I wasn’t at that stage. Like, we had kissed a few times, but it kind of felt very early for that.” They weren’t even in an official couple yet. While it isn’t mandatory to hook up in the Hideaway, the building is strongly associated with the activity, and Maura was unusually sex positive even for an Islander. As he walked to his date, Tom was oozing with entitlement. He told the boys, “It will be interesting to see if she’s all mouth or not.”

Maura had gone downstairs to grab lingerie to wear to the Hideaway and saw that the men were gasping and clutching each other at the sight of her, thinking she’d overheard what Tom had just said. She had not and asked Tom to repeat it. For some reason, he did, to which a horrified Maura replied, “Are you fucking joking?” Tom, realizing his gaffe, tried to reframe it as a miscommunication. “You said it, making me feel like a piece of shit,” Maura yelled in the dressing room as the other women turned their backs in an effort to do something between disappear from this mortal coil and eavesdrop more effectively. The camera kept zooming in on a mirror, where Molly-Mae hid her face with knit fingers as Tom sputtered, no longer brave enough to slag off Maura now that they were face-to-face. “What? ‘Uh, uh’?” she said, mocking his inability to articulate. The shot cut to Molly-Mae’s reflection again, shown shaking with silent laughter. “They ‘asked you a question’?” Maura said. “Maybe you should have been a gentleman.” Cutting Tom to ribbons was what Maura could do with her mouth.

Along with the rest of the show’s fandom, Love Island USA host Ariana Madix became enraptured with Maura while watching this play out on-screen. “That’s my favorite Maura moment, because you know what? That is who she is through and through. She is an Irish queen,” she says of her friend and Aftersun castmate. Maura also enjoys it as a viewer. “Every time it comes up, I still watch it to this day,” she says. “You do really forget that the cameras are there, and you don’t know what’s being shown, what’s not. The way it was all edited together was just brilliant.”

Episode after episode and quip after flame-up, Maura generated evidence that she was a Hall of Fame Islander. She was incautious in a way that allowed her to role with the extemporaneous production style and social milieu; when Tom tried to make her look foolish or she managed to do that herself, Maura never felt embarrassed. After she decided she liked Curtis, she voraciously pursued him. Though Chris Taylor was ostensibly a much better match for someone who loved to spar through quips, Maura spent her date with him spying on Curtis, who was telling his own partner that he was interested in Maura.

Once he submitted to her crush, Curtis also relaxed into Maura's improvisatory approach to things. “She brought out a more fun side to me,” Curtis says. “I felt like with Amy [Hart], I was a married man. With Maura, I felt like I was more my age.”

She even got the not-always-quotable Molly-Mae to start riffing. “Maura’s going to literally destroy Curtis in the Hideaway,” Molly-Mae said when the pair got together and Maura was finally headed to the bungalow with someone who wasn’t using her sexuality to make himself look big. (Curtis did briefly workshop a joke referencing the “all mouth” line with the other men before deciding maybe it wasn’t the time, though as a bit, he did borrow Chris’s kimono, with the caveat that Curtis needed to fold the silk, not crease it.) “He’s going to come back with a limp,” Molly-Mae insisted.

When Maura returned, she issued her verdict: “It was fanny-tastic,” she said.

Spending less time in his head—not striving to be the group’s parental figure or barista but a guy flirting with one of the funniest Islanders ever—took Curtis to the end. “Maura’s vote probably got me to the final,” he says, now that he’s had time to reflect on it. “She had the whole of Love Island behind her. People loved her, so knowing all of this now, like, it wasn’t me [who] got to the final; it was bloody her.”

Excerpted from ENTER THE VILLA: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island by Anna Peele. Copyright 2026 Anna Peele. Published by Atria Books.