Neither Leah nor Rob had crucial pieces of information. The first was that Leah, with her beguiling Valley monotone and passion for a man who cuddled with insects, was becoming the star of season 6. The second was that they had just put Love Island USA on a path that would quadruple its viewers over the next three weeks.
This crashout reached an ecstatic climax of what the show would be at its most transcendent: absurd, with genuine feeling. “If I write it in a script, you won’t believe it,” says Thomas, who executive produced the first six seasons of Love Island USA of the divinely unscripted moment his team had, if not manufactured, at least created the conditions for. “But if I show you Rob pencil-diving into the pool, it is cinema.”
When he could no longer take the temperature, Rob got out of the pool and went with a producer to chain-smoke and sob more. He’d only been on season 5 for a few days; he hadn’t realized what it would be like to be in the Villa full time, or that he’d never be alone to process his feelings about the decisions he had to make to stay on Love Island. “It was terrible,” Rob says of his breakdown. “I hope that never happens again. I actually now have anxiety, and I think it’s because of that.”
Leah didn’t know any of that when she went off about him to the girls the next evening in the changing room. “Everyone should be scared because I’ve been behaving myself so fucking well, and look what it got me,” Leah yelled while the women agreed that Rob was terrible and Dyson Airwrapped their hair into beach waves. “You can cradle him while he cries in the corner,” she said in the direction of Andrea, who was with Rob, out of earshot. “After I saw him crying like a bitch on the floor yesterday, I literally got the ick.”
Rob would go from divisive to unpopular with many fans, who voted him out on day thirty. The pool moment was broadly interpreted as manipulative—viewers thought Rob was trying to get out of a difficult conversation with Leah and that he had only pretended to have the collapse he was actually experiencing to engender sympathy.
When Rob left the Villa, producers told him two things: Love Island USA was the number one show in America, and Donald Trump had been shot. Then they gave him his phone back. “I had a bunch of hate,” Rob says of the fan reaction. “And then I had a bunch of . . . it wasn’t love, because it was like, ‘Yeah, no, he is actually a terrible person, but he’s so hot.’ At least there’s that.” (Other viewers found Rob refreshingly weird and amusing—and also hot.) His DMs were full of offers for sponsorship; the height of these opportunities was an offer to star in a Super Bowl commercial for Poppi soda.
Rob made enough money to buy a second home, but the effect was depersonalizing. “I was like a completely different” man, Rob says—one he didn’t like or respect. Though he says he’s blessed to have had the opportunity, “I hated it. I am so unhappy when I’m on a brand trip with a bunch of people, and they’re like, ‘Let’s do shots.’ I’m like, ‘Get me the fuck out of here.’” Rob returned to Alabama to spend time with snakes and work on his grandfather’s farm, where he would largely stay until a revelatory performance on The Traitors season 4.
