Connor Newsum Wants To Be Your Personal Coach – Here’s Why

Connor Newsum is done being “the guy from Love Island.”

Sure, he’ll still pop up on your screen this summer shirtless, lifting weights and tackling drama in the show’s spinoff series Love Island: Beyond the Villa. But he’s also plotting on bringing us something bigger — something he hopes will transform people’s lives the way it did his. 

Newsum expects to launch a virtual health coaching platform in July that will include calorie tracking, workout routines, exercise demonstrations, meal plans with grocery lists and one-on-one coaching from Newsum himself, Funktasy can exclusively reveal. 

The app doesn’t yet have a name, but it’s inspired by Newsum’s own shift to a healthy lifestyle, which he calls a “difficult process” he wished he’d had help navigating. 

“I know what it feels like to be so fed up with where you’re at in your life and just be exhausted and not know where to start to make things better,” the Santa Monica, California, native tells Funktasy. 

“And I know how to get to a better spot where you’re excited and have energy and wake up in the morning ready to get after it every day —  and the food that you eat makes you feel good.”

 

Unlike some celebrity-backed apps, Newsum’s venture is entirely personal. If you message him, he will reply to it himself. He’ll also send weekly voice notes specific to each client, emphasizing support rather than authority. 

It’s a part of a larger effort to bridge the gap between Newsum’s public persona and private passions. He knows people see him as the “exercise guy,” and he’s ready to use it to his benefit. 

This may surprise fans who only remember him as the flirty bombshell wearing skinny jeans in Fiji. But as Beyond the Villa prepares to air July 13 on Peacock, Newsum is ready to share who he is beyond the edited one-hour episodes. And spoiler alert: he doesn’t even wear skinny jeans. 

The Love Island spinoff series follows the lives of the Season 6 cast members as they navigate life, fame and relationships post-villa. This time, you’ll get to know them as people, not just someone looking for love on national TV. 

“It’s our lives,” Newsum says about the show. “Some people are putting the pieces back together. Some people are in their lane, thriving, and it follows all of it. We’re all kind of in L.A. just doing our thing, so there’s going to be some drama.”

Love Island: Beyond the Villa will feature Season 6 stars JaNa Craig, Aaron Evans, Miguel Harichi, Leah Kateb, Kaylor Martin, Serena Page, Kenny Rodriguez, Olivia Walker, Kendall Washington and Newsum, along with guest appearances from other former Islanders. 

“Let’s be real, you can’t get that group of people back together again and have it just be kumbaya the whole time,” Newsum says. “There’s things to be seen. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.”

One of the biggest changes for Newsum was learning to stop caring “a little too much” about what strangers thought of him. There was no escaping the thousands of passionate fans who were quick to voice their opinions of him online, some of them entailing something hateful. 

Rejoining the “real world” and facing the ill-intentioned social media comments was painful, he said. For him, it required separating the people he knows and cares for from strangers with a one-dimensional view of him. It meant creating a wall and realizing some people are just looking for a reason to tear someone else down. 

“I can’t go talk to every person who says something mean about me and then try and convince them that they’re wrong,” Newsum says. “You just go, ‘Fuck it!’ If anyone wants to take the time to get to know me, that matters. That’s what I care about.”

A year after leaving the villa, Newsum is finally comfortable showing up as himself, unedited and unapologetic. Yes, he’s returning to reality TV with the same core personality, but this time it’s with a clearer sense of who he is and less concern about what the public thinks. 

“Hopefully, the more authentic, true version of me comes through,” he says, “because that’s what I’ve just been trying to do. Just be myself.”

Prior to last summer’s season, the USA branch of the dating show didn’t have nearly as many viewers as its foreign counterparts, especially Love Island UK. And yet it became the No. 1 most-watched original streaming show in the U.S. during July 5-11, 2024, with 919.1 million minutes watched. That marked a 257% increase from its premiere week. 

Some people attribute its success to its big-personality casting, but regardless of the reason, no one really knew the show would do so well, including Newsum. One of the reasons he was initially drawn to the show was because of its minimal fame. Instead of signing on to gain clout from having his love life be broadcast for millions of viewers across the globe to see, he just saw it as a “fun adventure.” 

“Someone [on the show] had done something stupid, and they were embarrassed about it, and I was like, ‘Don’t worry. No one’s watching this,” Newsum even recalls, laughing at the irony. 

Because the Islanders don’t have access to their phones while in the villa, they had no idea the show was so popular. Once eliminated during Episode 16, Newsum says, the producers gave him a heads-up that things might change when he returned home.

But it didn’t matter. Even with the warning, Newsum had no idea what he was in for. 

Fan edits circulating on social media were one thing, but the lines of fans wanting a picture with him and people photographing him without his consent took some getting used to (as well as hearing the phrase “Connor from Love Island”). Although he was in the villa for nearly two weeks, being completely cut off from the outside world made him an overnight sensation. 

Hundreds of thousands of people now knew him, whether he liked it or not. And with that comes a sudden loss of privacy that, no matter how hard one tries, is difficult to regain. 

Sometimes it’s as harmless as people recognizing him when he’s trying to get away from the attention, like his fly fishing guide in remote Montana, who turned out to be a fan of the show. At other times, it’s one of his date nights that makes headlines across the internet, causing him to become much more cautious about who he spends his time with. 

“I was like, I hope this didn’t ruin me seriously dating someone in the future or my ability to find somebody trying to seriously date me — not somebody who’s just trying to go home later and be like, ‘I went on a date with the guy from Love Island,’” Newsum says. 

“I didn’t want to be someone’s good story later. I want to date someone and find someone that I cared about, and that felt more challenging after [the show].”

But it seems like it all worked out in the end, with Newsum hard-launching his relationship with Love Island USA Season 5 star Carmen Kocourek. Newsum shared a series of posts on Instagram on July 2 of the new couple, including a picture of him kissing her on the cheek, with some of his fellow cast members commenting in support. 

Before his sudden fame, Newsum was working in public relations, a career he found unfulfilling. Reality TV wasn’t on his radar until the producers of The Bachelorette invited him to be a contestant during Jen Tran’s season in 2024 after someone had nominated him. He declined the offer, but then, just two days before he planned to quit his job, Love Island USA producers called. 

One day later, he had a boarding pass to Fiji and only two days to get there. 

“I get teased about having skinny jeans on the show,” Newsum says with a laugh. “I bought all those pants, like, a night before I flew out, and I ordered them online. These are the pants I have. They’re tight. Whatever. It’s funny, because people would just think I was walking around with jeans like that 24/7 before the show, and I was not.”

Now, as he prepares to return to TV and launch his business venture, Newsum is focused on building a life outside the villa. For him, it’s about rewriting his story — one where being the “guy from Love Island” is just one chapter, not the whole book.