How Love Island host Maya Jama became a national treasure – and the secret heartache which has spurred her to success
FORGET the rippling six-packs, the barely there bikinis and who’s cracking on with who.
When the winter edition of Love Island kicked off last month, all eyes were on the scorching-hot new host Maya Jama.
As she sashayed on to screen for the first time wearing a jaw-dropping red two-piece that showed off her killer curves in all their glory, it was abundantly clear to everyone watching just who the star of the show was going to be.
Here was a woman who understood the assignment.
With her natural warmth, quick wit, cool confidence and stunning looks, Maya, 28, was an instant hit with the Love Island faithful, who immediately flooded social media to sing her praises.
“Overwhelmed from last night,” she tweeted after the launch show.
“Thank you so much for your kind words.”
Love Island will undoubtedly make her a household name and one of the most in-demand women in TV, but it hasn’t been a quick or effortless climb to the top…
Maya has had to grit her teeth and graft in order to earn her stripes, spending many years working “doubly hard” to prove she was more than just a celebrity girlfriend, thanks to her four-year relationship with grime superstar Stormzy.
And there has been plenty of personal heartache, tragedy and loss to contend with behind the scenes too, all of which has given Maya an inner steeliness and a resolve to seize every opportunity life presents her with.
“I hate the word ‘strong’,” she has said, “because why do you always have to be strong? But I’m resilient.”
Maya, who has Swedish and Somali heritage and was named after the celebrated American author and poet Maya Angelou, didn’t have the easiest start in life.
Born and raised in Bristol by single mother Sadie, money was tight and Maya, who found free school meals were a “massive, massive help” growing up, remembers her mum working several jobs to put food on the table.
“We’d go to the cheaper food shops and my mum would make sure we ate everything on our plate,” she says.
“Because you didn’t know when you were going to get your next healthy meal.”
Her dad Hussein was in and out of prison for mainly violent offences, and when she was 12, Maya made the brave decision to cut him out of her life.
“I remember me and my brother being put into the back of the car with a blanket for a long journey, and then we’d get searched by dogs on the way in and then talk to my dad across a table,” she has said about visiting Hussein in jail.
“There were sweets in the car, and it was a day out. It was only as I got older that I realised my friends’ families weren’t like mine, that they had dads who were around, not dads who were in prison.
“I started to think he should make more of an effort to stay out of jail, so he was around to be part of our family. He hadn’t been good to my mum; she was struggling, having to do lots of jobs and raising us on her own. And so I stopped going to see him.”
She is adamant that ending contact did not have a negative impact on her life.
“I had plenty of people around me who did what a dad should do. I never felt unloved; my childhood was as good as it could have been, and my dad’s brother was around, so there was a male presence.”
Father and daughter remained estranged for around a decade until 2017, when Maya was making a documentary for Channel 5 called When Dad Kills, which featured young people who had experienced similar childhoods to her own.
It made her think about their relationship and she arranged to see him, with a view to potentially reconciling.
Maya wanted to learn the reasons behind his criminal behaviour and hear an explanation as to why he had effectively abandoned his family, but sadly the reunion didn’t bring her the answers or the closure she was searching for.
Shortly after their meeting, she said: “I know it was an ambitious aim, but I thought maybe there was one thing or a few things that would explain him to me, put him into context.
“But I can see it’s not as simple as I hoped. I’m left thinking that either he is just bad, or there are things I don’t know about him and may never know.”
Thankfully, Maya enjoys a great relationship with her stepfather, and is so close to her mum that they are more like sisters than mother and daughter.
She has said: “She had me at 18, so our relationship was a bit different. I rebelled less because I was quite free. My mum’s always been like: ‘I want you to have your experiences, just tell me. I’m not going to judge you or shout at you.’”
However, aged 16, Maya suffered a tragedy that would come to re-focus her entire outlook on life.
Her boyfriend and first love Rico Gordon, then 21, was shot and killed after being innocently caught in the crossfire of an incident in a pub in Bristol in 2011.
Maya even appeared on Crimewatch to appeal for witnesses – an act of immense courage from someone so young. Two men were later given life sentences for murder.
“That completely changed everything,” Maya has said of the killing.
“Losing anyone at a young age is hard, and loss changes your perspective on life.”
Although traumatised by Rico’s death, she became more determined to achieve her dreams and not to allow anything to pass her by.
“I am not going to let any chance miss me,” she has said.
“I am going to do everything in my power to be the best person I can be.”
Maya soon moved permanently to London to study performing arts in the hope of becoming an actress.
But when an opportunity arose to work at YouTube channel Jump Off TV, she put her renewed “life’s too short” mentality into practice, quitting her college course for the unpaid role and working any spare hours at Urban Outfitters to pay the bills.
“I was broke, pretending I’d lost my Oyster card every day so I could get to work,” she has said.
“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.”
The leap of faith paid off when Jump Off handed her a presenting role, which led to her being spotted by eagle-eyed producers at MTV, who offered her a job on The Wrap Up in 2014.
By this time, she had decided that her future lay in presenting.
“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?”
She was also hosting a weekday drive-time show on pirate radio station Rinse FM, where she stayed until 2017.
But when she got together with the then up-and-coming grime artist Stormzy, they soon became London’s coolest couple, and the fact they tried to keep their relationship under wraps only added to their appeal.
“I don’t think either of us knew it was going to be such a big thing,” she has reflected.
“We were just: ‘We’re young and in love and we’re going to go for it and work really hard.’ We never really did red carpets. We didn’t do any of that stuff.”
Except for one joint shoot for Vogue in 2018, they were careful to make sure the lines between the personal and professional remained separate.
Nevertheless, Maya was aware that, as a woman, she would now have to go the extra mile to prove she was successful on merit – and not because of who she was dating.
“I felt like I had to do loads just to prove that I deserved to be in the room,” she has since reflected.
“Throughout my life I’ve had this, whether it was having a partner who was in the public eye and people thinking I was riding his wave. I thought: ‘OK, I’ll work doubly hard so no one can say she’s only here because of that.’”
As a couple, they appeared solid, so it came as a surprise to the showbiz world when Maya and Stormzy announced their split in 2019 after four years together.
There were reports Stormzy wanted to win Maya back, and in the lyrics of Lessons, from his 2019 album Heavy Is The Head, he appeared to take the blame for the break-up: “You gave me the world and then I gave you disrespect/Hand on my heart, this is my biggest of regrets/Thought I’d say it here than rather fling it in a text/Until you’re ready to forgive I’m always wishing you the best.”
Maya has rarely spoken publicly about Stormzy, but has said they were “just little babies” when they first met, both at the beginning of their careers. And the attention around the relationship has made her wary.
“It makes me nervous [about] who I’m going to be with next, because if they aren’t in the public eye already, maybe they’re going to be brought into [it]. It’s made me extra careful.”
Although rumours circulated at the end of last year that Maya and Stormzy had rekindled their romance, she was quick to put out that fire, though her rep insisted that they remain “great friends”.
Maya continued to add to her CV with co-hosting gigs, such as at the 2017 MOBO Awards with Marvin Humes and providing red-carpet coverage at the BRIT Awards the following year with Professor Green.
In 2018, she joined Radio 1 to host Greatest Hits every Saturday, before being given her own show.
She fronted The Circle on Channel 4, became a team captain on ITV2 rap panel show Don’t Hate the Playaz, collaborated with clothing company Pretty Little Thing, and signed lucrative deals with Adidas, Gap and Kurt Geiger.
It was all going swimmingly until a blip in 2018, when an old tweet emerged in which Maya appeared to mock darker-skinned women.
She was accused of colourism and has since apologised, calling herself an “ignorant, stupid child” at the time the tweet was posted in 2012.
“Grow from that, learn from that, change from that,” is how she described the incident once the dust had settled.
“You have to apologise, take accountability, move forward… I feel like I’ve done that. I’m not perfect. I’m still a young woman and I’ll make mistakes. It’s about learning from them and not doing the same thing again.”
With more than enough TV and brand work to keep her busy, Maya took the “difficult decision” to leave Radio 1 in May 2020, and the following month began co-hosting Saturday-night show Peter Crouch: Save Our Summer on BBC1.
She then launched MIJ Masks, selling face and eye masks, which has proved wildly successful.
And if that wasn’t enough, in January 2021 she was announced as Stacey Dooley’s replacement on BBC3’s Glow Up: Britain’s Next Make-up Star.
But taking over from Laura Whitmore as host of Love Island is, as Maya has herself said, the “golden ticket” – and culmination of years of perseverance and hard work.
And the significance of becoming the first woman of colour to present the show is not lost on her, either.
She reflected, saying: “Growing up, I never saw an East African woman host a show, and no black or mixed-race woman host such a big prime-time show, other than June Sarpong.
“This is a big moment for all of us, and I hope it just opens way more doors for other people from similar backgrounds and cultures as myself.”
Brand and culture expert Nick Ede agrees that Maya is “on her way to becoming a national treasure”.
He says: “She’s won our hearts with her fabulous style, witty personality and great presenting skills, and now she’s an unstoppable force for brands who will jump to offer her big-money deals.
“She has the ability to command mega-bucks and I can see her star rising even more as the years go on. She is one of those rare stars, like Alesha Dixon, who engage the whole nation.”
Currently “really, really single” after splitting from NBA star ex-fiancé Ben Simmons – who has apparently sent her a legal letter demanding she return the £800k engagement ring – there’s no question that Maya has made it in her own right.
She’s here because she deserves to be.
She said: “I understood at the time. [Stormzy] was – he is – massive in the public eye and a lot of people didn’t know who I was.
“But now I do feel people know my name separately, and it does feel I’m coming into my own. It feels like I’m finally getting recognition for my hard work.”
We can’t wait to see her star rise even further.