‘Applying for Love Island was torture – bosses made my parents sign their permission’
Less than six months afterLove Island was last on our screens, a new winter series is here to make the dark days and cold nights a little more bearable.
Three yearsafter Love Island jetted off to South Africa in its first instalment of its winter show, the dating show is back and awhole new host of singletons are hoping to find their match on the holiday of a lifetime.
And besides potentially finding The One, contestants can also walk home with a £50,000 prize should they be crowned King or Queen of the villa.
So, with that in mind,how do you actually apply for the show? OK! spoke to 2021 starAndrea-Jane (AJ) Bunker about how she landed a place on Love Island…
“At the time I applied for Love Island, I was 27, single and done with dating apps. I’d seen other people go into the villa and come out with successful relationships, so I thought that it was worth a shot.
I went onto the ITV website and started filling in my application. It was a really long form, though the worst part was having to make a one minute video about myself. I remember filming myself in my conservatory and repeating how much I could bring some spice into the villa. It wasn’t anything extravagant.
I never thought anything of it as so many people apply for the show, so two months later when a random mobile number called me, I’d forgotten that I’d even applied. Typically I don’t like answering the phone to people I don’t know, but for some reason I decided to take this call. It was one of the casting producers telling me that I was through to the next round and would be taking part in a video call.
As soon as I got the call, I contacted my best friend who organised a fake audition so that I could prepare. She Googled lots of different questions and acted as if she was a producer, and spent days asking me about my dating life. By the time the actual casting team were asking me about my dream man and worst ever date, my answers came naturally.
But because the interviews took place in lockdown, I hadn’t been able to get my hair or lashes done in months. As a result, I ended up wearing press on nails and fake lashes and tried to distract from my roots by making my hair as bouncy as possible. When it came to my outfit, my method was to have as much cleavage and skin on display as possible – given that I’d be wearing a bikini in the villa, I thought that made the most sense.
Over the process of eight weeks, I was spending around two days a week doing various interviews and tests. I had three video calls with casting producers, two meetings with a psychiatrist, two final calls with the executive producers and then had a drugs and STI test.
Luckily my job was quite flexible so I was able to schedule all of my calls around my lunch breaks. However, I remember being told I needed to go into London to do my STI test and I was desperate to be as accommodating for the producers as possible, so I agreed without thinking twice. I ended up telling work I had a GP appointment so that I could get time off.
Throughout it all, the most painful thing about the whole process was the waiting. I was always waiting for a phone call to tell me that I’d moved onto the next stage and I couldn’t think about anything else. At work I’d be sitting at my desk wondering if I’d get a call and when I was going to sleep I wondered if I’d hear anything the next day. It was torturous.
And it wasn’t just me involved in the process – my parents had their fair share of paperwork too. They had to confirm that they were okay with me going on the show and everything it could potentially bring, from the media attention to the trolling.
What’s more, the Love Island team even went through all of my social media accounts and looked through every photo or comment I’d ever posted. I’d had my Facebook page since I was in my early teens, so there were a lot of things on there. I ended up being told to deactivate my account just because it was easier to take it all down than for them to scroll through 15 years of content.
For the final stage, I was in a room with three executive producers who were asking me intense questions while seeing how I was in front of the camera. All of the execs had different personalities, so it felt like they all had different roles. One was asking serious questions, while another was super fun and bubbly. It felt like the hardest job interview of my life.
After weeks of dedicating myself to the process, my hard work paid off and a producer called me to say that they loved my feistiness and wanted me to be a bombshell.”
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