Olivia Attwood admits she was ‘fake’ in the Love Island villa and putting on a front

But it was for a good reason


Olivia Attwood is known as one of the most fiery Love Islanders of all time, and she certainly wasn’t afraid of an argument in the villa.

However, in a new interview, the 33-year-old has revealed she was putting on a fake front the entire time to try and mask her insecurities.

Speaking to The Guardian, she said: “The person who shouts the loudest is normally not the most secure. I was definitely emulating bravado.”

She was pretending to be bold to impress others to try and hide how shy she really was. At the time, she also had a huge hatred for men, and the two combined made her pretty explosive.

Olivia and Chris

Credit: ITV

“I was excited to go on Love Island, but also freshly heartbroken, so felt a lot of anger towards men. Thinking all men suck is not the ideal energy to carry into a dating show,” she said.

“As a result, I was quite reactive in the house, which was like a pressure cooker anyway, especially for someone quite impulsive.”

Olivia had a fair few blazing rows with her partner Chris Hughes on Love Island, but she’s not actually like that in real life.

She was “painfully shy” as a child and struggled to deal with her undiagnosed ADHD, which always made her very impulsive when she didn’t mean to be.

“In primary school, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, but ADHD took a lot longer to figure out. The word was flung around a lot by teachers, but girls weren’t diagnosed with it much, especially not neurotic, meticulously organised ones like me,” she recalled.

Olivia Attwood

Credit: ITV

“I had no impulse control whatsoever. I got told off all the time for doing stupid stuff. I was on a nature trip once and a teacher was showing us a box with geckos in it. I was told to take a look but under no circumstances should I put my hand in the box. Naturally, I had a gecko hanging off my finger a split second later.”

Her mum was frustrated and would ask “Why is it always you?” which made her upset because she didn’t want to be naughty. She said it was like “there was something fundamentally wrong with me” and for a long time she “carried a lot of shame”.

While the phrase was thrown around a lot when she was a child, Olivia was only actually diagnosed with ADHD in 2019, three years after she went on Love Island. She told Grazia finally getting a diagnosis and “getting it under control” really “changed her life”.

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Featured image by: ITV

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