Yahoo News Love Island's Shaughna Phillips says teenage contestants are 'boring'
2020 Love Island star Shaughna Phillips wants to see contestants with kids rather than youngsters who have 'not even lived yet'.
Love Island star Shaughna Phillips has confessed that she finds the show's reliance on young contestants to be "boring" and "creepy". She said she's tired of seeing teenagers flirting with people at the end of their twenties.
The reality TV show has featured several teenagers in recent years, with the offspring of famous faces often being introduced at a young age. Dennis Wise's 19-year-old daughter Amber appeared in 2023, while Gemma Owen — also 19 at the time — was a runner-up in the summer of 2022.
Mirroring the views of a lot of fans on social media, Phillips — who starred in the 2020 winter series — told The Sun that she doesn't "want to see a 29-year-old boy cracking on with a 19-year-old girl".
"It's creepy. I don't like it and I don't want to watch it. Maybe the [minimum age] needs to be upped to 21," she said.
"I think they need to branch out and widen their pool a little bit because I'm 30 and I don't want to watch 19-year-olds chatting each other up because, to me, they've not even lived yet and a 19-year-old is still a child."
Phillips said the show needs to rethink its approach to age and explained how her own experience of being one of the oldest people on her series came as a surprise.
She added: "They need older people, maybe some who have kids. But when they're really young, in my opinion, it's boring. When I was on Love Island I was 25 and I was one of the oldest people, and that's sad."
In the 2023 series of Love Island, only three of the 11 original Islanders were aged 25 or over, with two 21-year-olds in the initial cast. The winning couple — Jess Harding and Sammy Root — were both 22.
There has been an increasing backlash among viewers to age gap romances on the show, with Ofcom receiving 167 complaints after Gemma Owen kissed Davide Sanclimenti, who is eight years older than her.
The show's voiceover man Iain Stirling addressed the Love Island age gap controversy in an interview on Good Morning Britain to promote the All Stars series earlier this year.
He had a lot of praise for 33-year-old Hannah Elizabeth, who returned to All Stars having initially appeared on the first series of Love Island in 2015.
Stirling said: "33 is quite young, but it's not when you're in a bikini trying to chat to 25-year-olds about what they do for a living."
Love Island 2024 is due to start on Monday, 3 June at 9pm, introducing a whole new cast of singletons looking for love in Majorca.
Read more:
