Peacock’s Beyond the Villa is bringing back many stars from season 7 of Love Island USA — but Nic Vansteenberghe, Olandria Carthen and Huda Mustafa are noticeably missing from the spinoff.
Peacock’s Love Island USA follows a group of singles who have to pair off in order to stay in the show’s luxury villa in Fiji. The contestants — who are referred to as Islanders — live in isolation and are under constant video surveillance. They must be coupled up to remain on the show and to stand a chance to receive the prize of $100,000.
Nearly a year after their season aired, Bryan Arenales, Gracyn Blackmore, Jeremiah Brown, Clarke Carraway, Amaya Espinal, Hannah Fields, Pepe Garcia, Iris Kendall, TJ Palma, Andreina Santos, Chris Seeley, Belle-A Walker, CoCo Watson and Taylor Williams all signed on to appear in season 2 of Beyond the Villa.
Nic and Olandria, who placed second place in season 7, weren’t featured on the show as they remain booked and busy. While Nic has continued to focus on his DJ career, Olandria made her runway debut. The trailer for Beyond the Villa teased a small cameo from Nic but Olandria didn’t appear to be there with him. Huda was also not featured in the sneak peek after she started dating Louis Russell and seemingly grew more distant from the rest of the Love Island USA cast.
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The Beyond the Villa cast recently spoke with Us Weekly about their return to reality TV.
“I think for all of us — especially me — some of us weren’t shown enough where people just form these opinions and they see clips and they think that they know you or have an idea of you as a person,” Clarke shared about her concerns coming off season 7 of Love Island USA. “That’s not at all the case.”
She continued: “All of us know each other pretty well. We get to see the full personality while we’re living it in real life in the villa. But taking the opportunity to do Beyond the Villa — and to be able to showcase your personality and who you truly are — was a lot of our hopes and one of the reasons for us wanting to do the spinoff.”
Belle-A, meanwhile, pointed out that not every Islander lasted long on Love Island USA, adding, “Most of us on Beyond the Villa weren’t in the villa for a very long time. So when the cast was released, a lot of the audience was like, ‘Really? These people?’”
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She added: “A lot of people refer to us as side characters and I feel like it’s because they didn’t get a deeper look into our lives. I do think that Beyond the Villa is a good opportunity for them to get to know more about us — and hopefully they’ll learn to love us as well.”
Hannah referred to their return as an adjustment.
“It was a little hard because I feel like now we move with a different intention. In the back of your mind, you’re always going to have a thought of how every move that you make is going to be perceived — even off camera,” she explained to Us. “So I think that maybe I took a little play into it. Because obviously in the villa you have no clue what’s going on at all. You come out to a huge reality check. Now we at least can process our thoughts in real time, think about it and then move forward.”
New episodes of Beyond the Villa air Wednesdays on Peacock.
