FBOY Island’s Fernando Titus Speaks On WILD Show Drama & His Island Experience | Divij’s Den | Ep 13 When Fernando Titus signed up to be a contestant on “FBoy Island,” he didn’t know the show was going to be called “FBoy Island.”
In fact, he knew very little about the new reality dating competition, premiering Thursday, July 29 on HBO Max.
But after three years of trying out for different reality shows, including “The Bachelor” and “12 Dates of Christmas,” he was just happy to make the cut.
“I’ve always wanted to be on a dating show,” Titus tells NJ Advance Media. “I’ve been watching reality TV since I was a kid. ‘Jersey Shore.’ ‘Real World.’ It always caught my eye.”
Titus, 27, a chiropractor and Olympic hopeful who grew up in Jersey City, says he has a lot to offer TV, he’s just never been chosen before.
“I always make it to the end and never get selected,” he says of the typical casting process. “It always hurts every time.”
What is “FBoy Island,” exactly? It helps to start with the fboy.
“Over the past 20 years, the fboy has become both more powerful and more prominent,” says comedian Nikki Glaser, the show’s host, in the first episode, somehow managing to hold a straight face (we hope they paid her a lot).
“We have been forced to tolerate the manipulative douchebaggery of the unchecked male ego for far too long,” she says, getting back into form. “And that is why we’re here.”
Self-proclaimed “fboys” are involved, but so are “nice guys” who say they wouldn’t mind being in a relationship. The premise: three women make their picks from among 24 men — 12 fboys and 12 nice guys. All of the men compete for a chance at love and/or $100,000. The fboys, we’re told, only care about the money. Titus is also trying out for the Olympic bobsled team.
It’s up to the three women — Nakia Renee, CJ Franco and Sarah Emig — to make decisions about who will stay on the island.
The show was filmed earlier this year, and while COVID-19 vaccines were available, not everyone got vaccinated, says Titus, an alum of McNair Academic High School in Jersey City. There was a two-week quarantine and contestants were tested every three days.
Unlike any number of dating shows like “The Bachelor,” the fboys have revealed their affiliation to the producers ahead of time (there’s a bit of a twist later on that raises the stakes of the final picks).
At the outset, the women don’t know who is a nice guy and who is to be avoided — though fboy status doesn’t always mean they’re unappealing to the three ladies. Often, the appeal is the problem. Sarah Emig, CJ Franco and Nakia Renee pick between "nice guys" and "fboys" for a chance at $100,000 in "FBoy Island."
Take Garrett, a “bitcoin investor” who proclaims himself “king of the fboys” from the jump.
“If it’s love or money, I’m choosing money every time,” he says.
Fboys like Garrett set out to deliver SAG-worthy performances to convince the women that they are genuine. Or, maybe they actually do change and enter “nice guy” territory, if such things are to be believed.
Of course, “island” means there’s a tropical backdrop — in this case, the Cayman Islands.
“When we got there, they didn’t even know the name of the show,” says Titus, who currently resides in Santa Monica, California. He was tapped for the series in 2020, when he was a student at the Southern California University of Health Sciences.
“Everything was secret,” he says. “We knew nothing.”As Titus noticed more and more men show up — “We were not your average-looking guys,” he says of the sculpted demographic — he figured there would be a similar number of women on the way, too.
Glaser has some fun dressing down the men in the show (both with jokes and open offers for them to take off their shirts).
The guys arrive on a boat, most of them accessorized with beaded necklaces.
“You look great,” Glaser tells the muscled pack. “I didn’t know that GNC sold jewelry.”
