On ‘The Toast’ Pepe Garcia Finally Explains Why He Saved Taylor, the Moment That Gave Him the Chills, & Other ‘Love Island’ Drama

Pepe Garcia stepped out of the Love Island villa just 24 hours ago, and over on The Toast, Claudia Oshry is sitting down with him so he can explain—in his own words—all the moments that made us go WTF this season.

Pepe, if you didn’t know, is a 27-year-old former overseas basketball player who finished fourth on the reality dating show alongside partner Iris Kendall. On Zoom with Oshry, Pepe sounds exactly like the man we’ve grown to adore since his entrance into the Fiji villa as a bombshell. He’s mature and loyal. He’s genuinely bewildered by sudden fame. He’s adjusting to life with a phone.

“I walked into this experience thinking I’m gonna walk out with maybe a couple thousand followers more,” he tells Oshry, who came out of maternity leave (!) specifically to interview Pepe. “I had never seen the show, so I didn’t know that last season had gone so well.”

Oshry, a self-proclaimed “Papyrus Stan” (the couple name for Pepe and Iris), tells him he’s “the only person I would’ve gotten out of bed for” before asking him to address everything from Hannah’s shocking elimination to that finale moment where he completely ignored Huda.

He’s still pressed about Hannah getting voted out

Let’s start with week three: Hannah’s elimination. Pepe was “very honestly, very shocked” when the girls voted her out, calling it one of many unpredictable moments this season. “I think that was the name of the season,” he says. “If somebody told me this is how the whole season was gonna play out, I would’ve either thought you were lying to me or you were the smartest person in the world.”

Pepe tells Oshry he called out Huda for her potential role in the elimination, revealing he had a chat with her afterward. “I had a conversation with her and kind of told her I wasn’t a big fan of the way she moved and the way she did a couple things considering Hannah really took care of her.”

No, he hasn’t talked to Hannah yet—he’s been busy catching up with close friends and family—but he says, “I definitely want to call her.”

Why did Pepe choose to save Taylor?

Perhaps Pepe’s most defining moment came during a challenge where the islanders had to vote someone off. To Oshry’s frustration, and that of many viewers, Pepe chose to save Taylor Williams, the contestant who coupled up with someone new during Casa Amor, after giving our girl Olandria Carthen mixed signals for weeks in the villa. Pepe choosing to save Taylor in that moment also ended up breaking Iris’s heart for eliminating TJ Palma: “The way I wanted to kill you,” Oshry admits, “especially because I felt in that moment so deeply for Iris, like she is in an active couple. Like she was so emotional and I really wanted to kill you.”

His explanation makes it less infuriating though. “Taylor is one of the guys in there that since the day I walked in has had my back,” Pepe explains. “There’s not one point in my villa experience with Taylor that he did anything that was not to help me. I respected him so much for everything that he’s done for me from literally the beginning to the end.”

Pepe says Taylor was the third person he called when he got his phone back, after his parents and family, so maybe that’s why we love Pepe—all loyalty, no strategy.

The Jalen love and the moment that gave Pepe chills

No Love Island conversation is complete without mentioning Jalen Brown, Pepe’s bombshell partner who became an internet sensation despite being eliminated early. Jalen’s story—getting his first passport for the show, being his first time leaving the country, then being rejected and sent home—did something to us during a season that felt way too exhausting to watch at times.

Pepe says finding out how much America loved Jalen (“the sweetest man on the planet”) is the one moment that gave him the chills after leaving the villa and getting his phone back.

“He went from working his butt off and just being in Georgia to now he’s able to explore everything,” explains Pepe of Jalen’s post-villa life. “Those are the things that you realize. He was there not to win, not to stay there for a long time. He was there to do his thing, to be himself, to put himself out there. He did, and he’s being rewarded for it.”

What’s next for Pepe and Iris, plus that finale Huda shade

Pepe and Iris are very much still together and planning on hanging out this week (“something smaller,” says Pepe). But transitioning from villa life to actual dating is…not that straightforward. For one, they’ve never texted, and they don’t automatically have each other’s numbers.

“When I got home, I realized, shoot, I need to text her. I need to like tell her, Hey, I’m home,” Pepe explains, “All these little things that you do pretty quickly into relationships that I didn’t…even last night I was like, Do you wanna FaceTime? And it was also very awkward asking the question, whereas usually…I wouldn’t have even asked. I would just call.”

And finally, remember when Iris asked if Pepe had a kiss for Huda during the finale, and he gave the most withering look? Well, Pepe says that he does not, in fact, hate Huda. “There’s a lot of moments that you don’t really notice that they’re gonna put in there,” he says. “But you’re just trying to joke around and you like, you kind of wait for them to continue to play something and it just doesn’t happen.”

So there we have it.