The ‘Love Island: Beyond the Villa' Cast
At this point in Love Island USA season 7, audiences have seen hours of commercial break content featuring the stars of the previous season plugging brands like CeraVe, Maybelline, and InstaCart. It's already feeling more LA in here.
Peacock's Beyond the Villa is is both a continuation and a course correction. It's what happens when a dating show becomes an ecosystem—and its contestants become people with phones, fans, and feelings. Think: Love Island meets The Hills, with most of the cast we've seen and heard. Key word being 'most.'
Last season, Serena won the season and the edit. Post-villa, she's swapped modest Texas influencer vibes for a 2-million-follower presence, a forthcoming hair-care line, and a refreshing amount of mental health transparency.
She's still with Kordell Beckham, her co-winner, though he's largely offscreen, busy working on other projects. This absence makes her storyline quietly melancholic—part businesswoman-in-bloom, part long-distance relationship. There's something delicate about her attempt to scale without spinning out, and she's showing it all.
The couple you thought would break up immediately, but didn't. Leah is the coolest girl in your friend group you kind of resented for being spiritually centered and good at layering. Miguel is soft-voiced and European, which means you underestimated how emotionally available he'd be. Their arc is what happens when a hot couple decides to play house—but with vague discussions of 'parenthood, sort of' in between collabs and Trader Joe's runs.
JaNa does not believe in shrinking to be loved. She's one-third of the show's emotional holy trinity of aforementioned ladies, and easily its most quotable star. Kenny is the calm to her storm—the kind of man who listens first and thinks twice. They are the couple you root for because they seem real; but they might want slightly different things, and slightly too soon.
She's one half of the exes that should've muted each other, but got a show instead. Kaylor is a case study in heartbreak performance art. Aaron is what happens when emotional repression gets a skincare routine. Their breakup was brutal, and the show doesn't shy away from it.
Connor left the villa without a strong storyline and enters this show as the calming voiceover of everyone's drama. He's single, unbothered, and surprisingly wise. Is he boring? Possibly. Is he necessary? Absolutely.
Liv was a late addition to the villa and never fully clicked into the narrative. Here, she's mostly seen floating between Kaylor's emotions and her own quiet brand-building. But there's tension brewing. A friendship fallout is teased—one of those slow burns where texts go unanswered and Instagram likes suddenly stop flowing.
In the midst of a personal rebranding, Kendall arrives with baggage—specifically a breakup tied to a leaked video and a now-ex, Nicole Jacky, who doesn't care for quiet goodbyes. Their on-screen lunch is set up like a boxing match. He's in PR crisis mode, but this time, there's no villa edit to save him. His journey is either redemption or slow implosion.
'Love Island: Beyond the Villa' premieres exclusively on Peacock on July 13.
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In the meantime, Johnson talked to THR below about casting Harrison as the unexpected big bad this season, how Lyonne dove into both playing out and directing this surprising season-ender, and why they decided to blow up their show's format yet again. *** You told me I would be surprised by these final two episodes and I was, thanks for the tip! Oh, good. Good, good, good. about why you guys wanted to shed the big bad-chasing-Charlie plot of season one, and this season largely . But then these final two episodes introduced a surprising villain, someone who can actually lie to Charlie and go undetected, who sets up this ending of Charlie being a fugitive again. When in the writers room did you land on this arc to end the season? It was around the middle of breaking the season and writing the episodes. It was a build up of us wanting to try out a couple of different things and see if they would work in the Poker Face world. The first was: could Charlie have a sidekick, a Watson? The idea of doing a two-parter was an idea I was interested in. It was very much like the [classic] TV that this show is based on, and we wanted to see if we could pull that off with a Poker Face episode. Then it was Laura Deely, who ended up writing the finale, who came up with the pitch: 'What if we introduce a character who seems like Watson, but ends up being Moriarty?' Another thing floating around in our heads was what a character would look like who could actually lie to Charlie. So all of those things came together. Now having seen that it does work to have Charlie a little more static, it also seemed fun and invigorating to then shake the box at the end of the season and put us in a place where we can be some place fresh [when we come back]. Natasha played this ending so devastatingly. It's written all over her face in her final conversation with FBI Agent Luca (Simon Helberg) when she realizes, after an existential but somewhat lighter season where she had this second lease on life, that she now has to go back to a life on the run. Did Natasha take any convincing when you landed on this ending? No, she was really, really into it. Having an uprooting and a real emotional place to play the final episode, Natasha was really, really into that. [Note: Lyonne also directed the finale.] She likes to dig in. She likes to have something to really chew on. In her direction and performance of that final scene between Charlie and Luca, she brings so much to it. You can see that she is just diving into the pool, so yeah, she was really excited. You of calling up a lot of your friends to play guest parts. Did you audition for the Iguana/Alex role, or did you have Patti Harrison in mind for this villain? We auditioned different actors for this part, and Patti was someone who I had met before who had read for other things and who I had always liked. Clea DuVall really suggested that we think about Patti for this part, and Patti first shows up in episode 10, which Clea [who also played Charlie's sister in season one] directed. But casting Patti was a much bigger thing, because we knew where this character was going to go and how big of a part she was going to play. We were describing all the traits we wanted the character to have — you have to genuinely buy them as someone you want Charlie to be with, and then it also has to make sense when they make the turn — and Clea said we should really look at Patti and she was right. We read a bunch of actors and Patti had that combination of factors. After Iguana/Alex revealed that she could lie to Charlie, and when she was trying to lie to her in their final drive, I was analyzing Patti's facial expressions and realized it would be a fun task to go back and try to spot her tells. Did you want to drop us hints along the way, would we notice if we went back? A little bit. Patti asked me about that. When I met with her before we cast her, I pitched her the character so she knew where it was going, and she asked how ambiguously she should play it and if she should drop hints. My take was for her to just play it straight. I thought there would be ambiguity if you go back and watch it, but this woman is incredibly good at her job. If she's good enough to fool Charlie, then you have to fool the audience as good as you can in those few episodes. I'm not sure if she personally threw a couple hints in there, but what we landed on was playing this as if it is what it is on the surface. We don't see her body after the car crash. We see that Charlie escapes, but Iguana has disappeared. The rules of television tell us that means she is not dead, at least not yet. (Laughs.) Yes, that's the cue! Is your hope to bring her back, and how much does this open the door to what you can do in a third season with her, considering she can successfully lie to Charlie (who is a human lie detector)? Yes, it absolutely does. The notion that this person is out there somewhere in the world and Charlie Cale has her Moriarty, her Lex Luthor, is very exciting. It opens up a whole realm of possibilities, and also I adore Patti. I think she's so talented and wonderful, and the idea of finding a way to loop her back in would be very, very cool. Can you talk me through how you landed on your 'To be Continued' cliffhanger — which you then pulled back and answered by showing us that Charlie escapes before her Plymouth Baracuda goes off the cliff? Did you have fun messing with us, Rian?! (Laughs) I was just giggling in the edit room getting the timing of that exactly right with Natasha. It brings me so much joy, because I know that we are going to play fair after that break. I hope nobody stops watching after that! Peacock was a little nervous about that. They were like, 'Ehh, do you have to put To Be Continued?' I was like, 'I think it will be fine.' But it's another great harkening back to the commercial break cuts that I grew up with [on TV shows] as a kid. A car would go off the ramp at the Universal backlot, the show would freeze frame and it would be like, 'How are they going to get out of this one!' 'Tune in next week!' Exactly. It was something that I thought was delightful, and hopefully it wasn't too temporarily frustrating! Did you actually destroy the car? No, we didn't. I'm sure it was briefly discussed and our line producer, Jeff Bernstein, pulled us back from the edge. Does that mean you could revive the car, or are you putting that ride to rest? 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But at the end of the day, there's something about her character that just feels nice being out on the highway and the Americana of that. I thought Natasha did that so beautifully with the wintery road and with her [real] dog, Root Beer. Even after all of this, Charlie can't let this pain-in-the-ass little dog freeze in the road. It just seemed like nice Americana energy to end with. And Root Beer is such a ham. Where are you now with talks about season three? And did you approach this finale like it could be the end of the show? Well, you never know how something is going to do, and honestly, I have a feeling those conversations are just about to start, so we'll see. I don't want to count any chickens. But you never know, especially with television today, and that's the balancing act. You leave it open in case you're lucky enough to come back, and have it end on a place that is satisfying if things don't go that way. The episodes dropped weekly, so this season got to play out over two months. You get to engage in the viewer reaction and also, I imagine, get some viewership feedback from Peacock along the way. How do you feel this season was received? First of all, I love the [weekly] rollout, because the show really does function almost more as an anthology than a serialized show, and it gives each guest star and guest director a chance to shine each week. It's also the type of show that benefits from space. I don't think this is a show that's necessarily suited to binging or watching a bunch in a row. I think watching one and then taking a week to watch the next, there's something old-school TV about that that feels right. I also love the idea that there's now 22 episodes of it on Peacock, and someone who discovers it can watch ones they're interested in and go back and watch more. Ultimately, that's also the way that a lot of us discover TV now. It's on a streaming service, you can go through and there's a massive menu of all these great actors in all of these great episodes. It's fun to get time-released week by week, but I love that they are all up right now. You and Natasha are both busy with. If you come back for a third season, do you imagine you would come back quicker than the two year-plus break between seasons one and two? There was too much time between seasons one and two. But you are right. We're lucky enough to be very busy people. You just kind of dive in and see what you can figure out, but I would hope that we'd come back with a little more speediness. I know Peacock would hope that! You typically have ideas that don't make it in that you put aside for the future. You spoke before about the excitement of creating the show's unique format with season one and then — and now you broke it again to end the season. What excites you for season three? At the heart of it, what I'm excited about is the same thing I've been excited about from the start, which is not so much the trajectory about where the bigger story is going to go, but the blue sky of so many different types of episodes left to do. There are so many different worlds, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood-style worlds, to explore. We could do a different profession every week and show the kids how the Post Office works. There's an element of that to the show. So it's less about the bigger direction for me, and more about how it's a massive, open sandbox. The notion of all the different types of episodes we can still do is really thrilling. Looking back, are there season two swings you took that you are learning from for a third season? Having just put it all up there, I'm still absorbing it myself, but I feel really proud of some of the bigger swings we took, like the grade school episode that I thought was really unique and fun. 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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 , 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. *** Love Island USA season seven is currently streaming on Peacock. 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