Ciara Miller and Tefi Pessoa Don’t Care If You Like Their Takes on ‘Love Island USA: Aftersun’ (Exclusive)

So here’s the thing: Ciara Miller and Tefi Pessoa know that fans aren’t always going to agree with their hot takes on Love Island USA: Aftersun, and frankly? They don’t really care. During an exclusive chat with Cosmo, the Aftersun hosts discussed the backlash they received after the June 27 episode (during which fans thought they were “too sympathetic” toward KC Chandler for his treatment of Aniya Harvey). The two later took to Threads to respond, and according to Tefi, “And I meant it. Period.”

She continues, “I don’t care if you don’t like Aftersun, because my mom’s proud of me, and I love my cohost, and we’re having a great time, so I don’t fucking care.”

What they do care about, however: fans deciding what they think Ciara and Tefi’s opinions should be based on what they know about the hosts’ personal lives. Alluding to her own experience filming Summer House, Ciara says, “We obviously don’t have room for everyone’s opinion and to take everything into account at certain points, but what I don’t like is that people kept trying to attack our character. Like, ‘Oh, you would think that you would be able to empathize with this person because of what just happened to you.’”

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As a reality TV veteran, Ciara points out that a balanced take is required in discussing Love Island USA, since viewers see so little of what is actually happening in the Villa. “There’s a lot of footage that we don’t see,” she says. “Things are probably more nuanced than the audience realizes.”

And as much as Ciara and Tefi would love to spend their hour each Saturday simply bashing the male Islanders (according to Ciara: “We have a really hard time defending men”), they know that would be neither interesting nor fair to their audience.

“I have to remind myself that is someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s baby cousin,” says Tefi. “I can’t be like, ‘How dare you?’ Like, Sincere, for sure, has gotten me to pause…but then I have to be like, ‘Tefi, you said crazy things to people when you were 25,’ right?”

She continues, “I’d like to encourage viewers to have patience and to watch a narrative unfold, because the person that is beloved this week could be the person that disappoints you the next week, à la KC.”

Truer words!