Remember Chris Middleton from Love Island 2025? No? Honestly, we don’t blame you. Poor Chris really did draw the short straw on series 12 – a Casa Amor bombshell who barely made the edit, struggled to find a connection, and was out before we’d even got to know him (or learned his first name).
With that being said, since leaving the villa, Chris has done all the right things: totally owned his fleeting stint, made light of his tragic storyline, and found new life on social media, regularly poking fun at himself (we love a self-deprecating Islander). Speaking of social media, he's been spilling juicy production secrets on his TikTok over the last few weeks, including, most recently, what actually happens to Islanders when they're dumped from the villa.
Speaking on TikTok, Chris pulled back the curtain on the post-dumping process, and yeah, it’s brutal. The minute your name comes up at a recoupling, there’s no time for a leisurely farewell or even a wee. 'You are straight out of the door,' Chris explained. 'You film the walk out, you do the exit interviews, and that’s it – no time to pack. Your stuff gets sent on to you.'
So where do dumped Islanders go? Straight to a holding villa. You might think you’d be free to hop on a plane home, but, nope, because Love Island airs with a delay, producers can’t risk spoilers, so ex-Islanders are whisked away and kept hidden for a day or two. Even crueler? You don’t get your phone back for a couple of days after your dumping. A COUPLE OF DAYS. Imagine having just been dumped from the nation’s most-watched villa and being told you can’t even doom-scroll TikTok as a distraction...
Chris called these few days a much-needed 'cooling off period' – a chance to breathe, process what’s just happened, and, yes, soak up a little more sun before rejoining the real world.
Chris entered the villa as one of six Casa Amor boy bombshells. Despite being hunky and hilarious, Chris struggled to form a strong connection with any of the girls. As a result, he received very limited airtime; so little that many viewers barely noticed him and joked that he had 'vanished' from the show. Ultimately, he was dumped from the villa during the Casa Amor recoupling.
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Ben Pulsford is a digital writer and producer at Bauer Media, creating content for Closer online and heatworld. Beyond his journalism, he dazzles as London drag queen Beary Poppins, co-hosting the Spill the Fizz podcast with Traitors series 2 star Diane Carson. If RuPaul asked grown-up Ben what he’d say to his seven-year-old self, it would be: 'Don’t worry, you grow up to score the gayest jobs on the planet — so hang in there, you little legend.'