
The beauty of beauty influencer Molly-Mae Hague is that she should be boring – but she just isn’t. By her own admission, the 25 year old “doesn’t like having fun”; she is an unabashed homebody who loves nothing more than rewatching the Harry Potter films in her pyjamas before having a bath and an early night. Yet after rising to fame as a contestant on reality dating show Love Island in 2019, Hague has managed to keep millions interested in her every move. She has 8.3m Instagram followers, a bestselling autobiography and her own clothing line, Maebe, which sold out 24 minutes after it launched last September. Now she’s the star of a six-part Prime Video docuseries, Molly-Mae: Behind It All.
The “it all” in question is single motherhood, the launch of Maebe, and her (extremely) well-publicised break-up with boxer Tommy Fury. The first three episodes dropped on 17 January while the next three are promised this spring.
“I just never, ever thought that when I launched my own clothing brand, we wouldn’t be together,” Hague says of Fury ten minutes into the first episode, which slowly teases out the reason for the couple’s split before revealing that while Fury has “never had an alcohol problem”, alcohol has “caused problems” for the couple. Despite promising to show Hague “as we’ve never seen her before”, this is not unrestricted, access-all-areas reality TV: Fury’s half of a contentious phone call is edited out; the “disastrous” things alcohol led to aren’t even hinted at.
Perhaps this is precisely why Hague isn’t boring – her paradox is that she can post over 100 pictures of herself on Instagram in a year but also somehow avoid oversharing. It’s not that she isn’t vulnerable with her fans – she talks about her struggles with anxiety on YouTube – it’s that she’s very visibly afraid of backlash, meaning her inner life remains shadowy and off-limits. “I don’t ever really say how I properly feel,” she admits in the docuseries. Her manager Francesca Britton-Lynch notes: “We don’t do a lot of interviews, we don’t put Molly in a position where she can have things twisted.”
This is undoubtedly because Hague irritated many in December 2021 when she appeared on entrepreneur Steven Bartlett’s podcast The Diary of a CEO. “We all have the same 24 hours in a day,” she said, both pre-empting and dismissing claims that this was “easy” for her to say because she didn’t grow up in poverty. “If you want something enough, you can achieve it.” Social media users called her tone deaf and “Thatcher with a fake tan.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the first three episodes of Molly-Mae: Behind It All are often circumspect. We follow Hague as she prepares for a London pop-up event to launch Maebe and dramatic music wants us to worry that, “We’ve bought a projector but it’s not the best quality” (the candles are also the wrong size). She shows us where she used to put her ring light when filming vlogs in her childhood bedroom (Hague first grew an online following as a schoolgirl). Later, she opens the drawer in her wardrobe where she keeps toothpicks and belts.
Yet every so often, the show does offer unprecedented glimpses into Hague’s inner world. We see flashes of genuine anger when she feels things aren’t going to plan: “I’m standing in crisp packets… it doesn’t look good!” she cries after taking impromptu photos with fans on the street. We see her hands-on perfectionism (or, if you’re feeling ungenerous, control freak tendencies), as well as the fact she is easily overwhelmed. As a result, Hague comes across as someone who wants to edit her own life like an Instagram picture – filtering out everything she dislikes and cropping out anything unknown.
That’s not to say Hague doesn’t also come across as likeable; she is quick-witted and, despite her own claims to contrary, very fun – a highlight is when she harmonises with her toddler daughter’s fussy crying. Hague is beloved because (if you ignore her £4m Cheshire mansion) she is an everywoman. In her regular vlogs, she expresses a desire to eat healthier, explains she’s a “sucker” for a Pumpkin-scented candle and says things like “I personally despise that the New Year started on a Wednesday.”
Yet TV shows are not vlogs, and consequently this homespun relatability can feel industrially manufactured in Molly-Mae: Behind It All. There’s a reason why the first five minutes of the show feature Hague ordering a McDonald’s before declaring: “I love food, like, I actually live to eat.” When done well, this feels, well, relatable –when done poorly, you sense that you are being manipulated by a multimillionaire. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to Hague’s separation with Fury.
“I wish it was a publicity stunt because that would be a lot easier,” Hague says of the break-up in episode one – but by episode three, she admits she hasn’t cried over the split because she “knew” she and Fury would get back together. The whole thing may not have been a publicity stunt, but it has certainly been used for publicity, with clever omissions keeping the public speculating (Hague wrote “I never imagined our story would end, especially not this way” when she announced the split on Instagram). “I think, really, I probably haven’t been honest with anyone,” Hague says in the docuseries, “because actually I’ve just been holding onto the hope and the idea that, as soulmates, we will always come back together.” The end of episode three teases the fact that the pair allegedly kissed on New Year’s Eve, four months after they broke up.
It’s hard not to feel a little misled, but it remains to be seen whether this will provoke any meaningful backlash. Instead, hate-watchers may search the doc for Hague’s trademark screenshot-able clangers – she once claimed she was unable to find a good meal in Italy (“It’s meant to be the home of pizza and pasta and I really can’t see how!”). Meanwhile, in her autobiography, she reminisced about a former lifeguarding job: “They used to tell us that if someone drowned on our watch, it could be taken really seriously.” Perhaps the best the doc can offer to compete with these is the line: “Someone said to me it’s all about the five senses. Smell… sight… the rest aren’t coming to me.”
Ultimately, it’s easy to like Hague but equally easy to criticise her. The problem with all of this is that Hague is not an island. Though she has deliberately shrunk her social life and avoids public speaking, the influencer cannot escape the fact that she is part of a much bigger – and uglier – world. In 2021, she was hired as the creative director of fast-fashion brand PrettyLittleThing – a year earlier, the company’s parent brand, Boohoo, faced accusations of modern slavery after it was discovered that its employees in Leicester made as little as £3.50 an hour. In this series, PrettyLittleThing’s chief marketing officer, Nicki Capstick, is a talking head who invites us to celebrate Hague’s rise. There’s so much that we’re being asked to ignore.
The show at least attempts to tackle the backlash against Maebe – last autumn, customers complained when a £140 blazer bobbled after one wear. While the docuseries takes pains to present Hague as a perfectionist who oversees every aspect of her brand, curiously it also tells us the blame for the blazer lies with the factory, who changed the fabric “without approval”. Where is this factory – how and why was it chosen? When Hague was interviewed by Vogue in November, she told journalist Sirin Kale that Maebe has factories in Turkey and China but was, “unable to answer questions on how the clothes are made.” Kale concluded that Hague, “doesn’t seem to have engaged in a meaningful way with the ethics of this industry.” So it jars to see Hague emotionally affected by the blazer backlash, particularly because as well as culpability, guilt is also curiously absent. “I feel a bit like I’ve let myself down,” she says – why herself? Why not her customers? Sad music plays as these reflections are interspersed with family footage of Hague as a child.
Molly-Mae: Behind It All wants it all – it wants to tell us Hague is a powerhouse businesswoman but also just a girl “figuring it out as I go.” It wants us to keep her in the limelight while also showing us the toll the limelight takes on her wellbeing. It wants us to feel sorry for her while showing her sat on the front of a yacht. Weirdly, I do.
At one point in the first three episodes, Molly-Mae Hague reveals she has taken 211,000 photos on her year-old phone; she wonders aloud, “Why am I stood there taking that many pictures of my bath before I get in the bath?” It’s reductive and often sexist to label influencers “self-obsessed”, but the longer Hague remains incurious about the world around her, the more she earns this label. “Molly’s the first to admit that she’s not perfect,” her manager says, “But all she wants is everyone to love her.” I wonder: is it to Hague’s benefit or her detriment that we’re all as obsessed with her as she is?
[See also: The inscrutable David Lynch]