Jacques O’Neill has broken his silence after walking out of the Love Island villa.
The 23-year-old made headlines when he left the ITV2 dating show earlier this week, despite reconciling with Paige Thorne.
Now, the former reality star has admitted he ‘couldn’t cope’ in the Majorca villa, and he ‘just wanted to go home’ to ‘get myself right.’
However, he says producers were keen for him to stay, with a bust-up with troublemaker Adam Collard looming after the bombshell grew closer with Paige.
The ex-rugby player said he feared things could get out of control and ‘go horribly wrong’ if he didn’t walk away from the programme, worrying that the situation with Adam ‘could get physical.’
‘At home, you can remove yourself from situations, but in there you had to deal with every situation, and in that moment I took my microphone off, and walked straight through the front doors because I just wanted to get out of that place,’ he said in an interview with The Sun.
‘Producers tried coming to me, they were like, “Jacques, are you ok?”, I was saying, “I don’t want to speak to you or anyone. I want to be left to myself”. It was too much.
‘I was saying to them, “This is more than a TV show to me”, it was genuine feelings involved and my headspace wasn’t right to be in a TV show.
‘I dealt with stuff in there that I’ve never dealt with in my life.’
Jacques went on to reveal that he actually left Love Island last Sunday initially, but viewers were only made aware on the Tuesday.
Producers encouraged him to return to the villa one day after his exit, pulling for a ‘welfare chat’ and assuring him that he was popular with viewers and ‘doing great.’
He said he spoke to Mike, ‘the big boss’, who managed to calm him down temporarily, but ‘in the end’ he ‘couldn’t deal with it’.
‘Doing Love Island was the worst decision of my life,’ he claimed.
‘I was ready to break down. I was feeling so mentally drained, I just wanted to go home and get myself right.’
Jacques described how he would be ‘crying my eyes out’ and feeling ‘the worst I’d ever felt in my life.’
Elsewhere in his post-exit interview, Jacques – who previously dated fellow Islander Gemma Owen before the show began – said he told the ITV team that he had ADHD before entering the show, since he was diagnosed at the age of nine.
He didn’t expect his condition to be an issue in the villa, but said ‘any little thing’ started to bother him.
Jacques would later explain to Welsh girl Paige that ADHD isn’t just about ‘not being able to concentrate’, but also about ‘feeling anxious quite a lot’, hence his response to Adam when he was ‘chatting s**t’ behind his back.
Following his departure from the villa, Jacques stayed in a separate apartment with a security guard and two producers.
He was there for two days before he was given his phone back and able to contact his mum.
However, he was able to search for his name online during this time, admitting that he wanted to go into hiding after feeling like ‘everybody hated me’.
The Leeds lad flew back to the UK on Tuesday night, with his mum, Janet Wright, meeting him at the airport.
While he attended rugby training with his old team Castleford Tigers the following morning, mum Janet, 60, said she could ‘tell he wasn’t himself’ as she watched the drama unfold on her screen each night, recalling receiving death threats herself on social media.
Despite no longer being on the inside of the villa, Jacques refuses to tune in from home, stating that he ‘just can’t do it’.
He is, however, prepared to wait for Paige – with whom he had a pretty rocky time of things – on the outside, so who knows where things might head.
ITV have been contacted for comment.
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