‘Love Island USA’ Narrator Responds to “Visceral Reaction” From Fans to Jeremiah Joke

Iain Stirling, the voice behind Love Island USA, swears all his jokes on the hit Peacock reality series come “from a place of love.”

The comedian has been narrating the U.K. version of Love Island for 10 years, and the U.S. version since season four. And while he enjoys getting to see the episodes before the world does and writing jokes for them, it doesn’t come without its challenges.

“I’m sort of glad I live in the U.K. because I wouldn’t have the willpower to not tell loads of people what’s going down on Love Island today. I’m so bad,” Stirling, who returns to America in October for his new stand-up show Iain Stirling Live, tells The Hollywood Reporter with a laugh.

Below, Stirling talks about the reality hit’s buzzy season seven, hosted by Ariana Madix, including his Jeremiah waiter joke that received a “visceral reaction” from fans, his process of writing the scripts and jokes for each episode, and relating to the “Islanders that are slightly ostracized from the group.”

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When it comes to writing the script and jokes for each episode, do you get excited that you know what happens before America does?

Putting the script together is probably the fun bits. There’s not a script per se when we first get in, we get given the show as it airs. Where the voiceover would be, the producers have recorded some temporary voiceover, so we just start writing it. We pause it when we hear a voiceover, put a little time code for where it goes and then just start writing the jokes. We go through act by act and just write them all, record them, send them to the channel.

The way it’s uploaded to Peacock, we get it a couple of days before anyone else, so it’s sort of crazy. I’m glad I live in the U.K. because I wouldn’t have the willpower to not tell loads of people what’s going down on Love Island today. (Laughs.) I’m so bad. In the U.K., when I started doing bigger interviews and stuff, they just stopped telling me things because then I was like, “If you don’t tell me anything, then I can go, ‘I don’t know.’”

You’ve been narrating Love Island, between the U.K. and U.S. versions, for 10 years now. What do you make of the whole experience, and do you hope to keep doing both of them in the future?

I think so. I really do hope I get to do them. They’re such an intense part of my year, but because I do them both together, I take a semi-retirement from the world for two months. I only have my hair cut because I was doing these [interviews] today. It’s nice just retreating away from the world. I can still do school runs and pickups and be around at home, which is so important to me. It’s one of the the main reasons I work, so I can have that family time. I hope I do it for ages.

It’s such an honor to work on a television show that becomes this weird cultural phenomenon. I did that on the U.K. one, now it’s happened again in America. It sounds so wanky, but I’m really trying to be present. This is so cool that this has happened again. People don’t get to do it once, let alone twice, and not with the same show.

Can you talk about what it’s like coming up with your cheeky commentary, such as when you got fans riled up a few episodes back when you said after Jeremiah got dumped from the villa, “You won’t believe this, but their [Nic and Olandria] waiter for this evening is Jeremiah. OK, I’m just joking about that last bit.”

The Jeremiah thing, we genuinely thought that was a really cute, lovely nod, because we never mentioned former Islanders once they’ve left. We were like, “Oh, that’ll be really funny,” and I do think what I underestimated was, I said, “Oh, the waiter’s Jeremiah,” and I went, “Ha, only joking. Still, Nick and Ondreania, that’s good, right?” But I think what happened is when I said Jeremiah, everyone just lost their minds and stopped listening to what I was saying. So I upset a few people that day and I really apologize about that. It came from a place of love. But it’s mad that you can make literally millions of people have a visceral reaction with a sentence. Like, how powerful is that? That’s so cool. 

Do you find yourself rooting for couples each season, or do you try to remain neutral?

Try to remain neutral, but I’m not going to lie, and a therapist would definitely identify it as coming from my time at high school, but I identify with any of the Islanders that are slightly ostracized from the group and don’t really fit in, because that was my entire time at high school. Like when Huda isn’t quite fitting in or when Austin couldn’t quite find the girl that liked him, those are the characters that speak to me.

I think it’s quite a British thing as well to be like, “I want the person least likely to win to win.” Like when Amaya was really struggling and the boys were telling her to stop calling them babe and it’s just so intrinsically her, I was like, “I’ve been that person where who you are as a person, it doesn’t quite fit with the environment you’re in and it’s really tricky.” So yeah, Amaya, Huda, Austin … it’s funny calling them rejects or oddballs because obviously they’re also incredibly articulate and beautiful people, but by the weird Love Island law that we live in, that’s what they are, I suppose. 

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Love Island USA season seven is currently streaming on Peacock.