Maya Jama on becoming a millionaire at 26 and why she’s quit dating

The presenter tells Katie Strick about buying her first house in south-west London, making her TV debut and why her best friend is like a husband and wife in one 
Maya Jama
Peperami

She’s become a millionaire, bought a house and made her acting debut on Neflix, but Maya Jama insists she doesn’t belong among the achievers of the pandemic period. The TV star and Save Our Summer presenter jokes that she hasn’t upped her fitness or taught herself mandarin like she intended at the start of the first lockdown. 

Instead, she’s quit dating, embraced the “au naturale” look and is enjoying a diet of cosy comfort food from the sofa: spaghetti Bolognese wrapped in a slice of pizza is her go-to dish when she’s really feeling like a “savage”.

Like most of us, Jama, 26, didn’t expect her autumn to look like this. 2020 was supposed to be her “TV takeover” year. After making her acting debut in Katherine Ryan’s Netflix comedy The Duchess in September, the next couple of months should have seen Jama hosting several new TV shows and jetting off to an undisclosed location to shoot her next film, Something In The Water.

Instead, filming has been postponed by five months and she’s found herself slowing down for the first time since 16. Which is probably needed, given how much the Bristol-born TV darling has crammed into the last decade: a gig on MTV, DJing on Rinse FM, a stint on Radio 1 and various hot-shot presenting jobs on Saturday-night TV. 

Last month, Jama revealed she’d also taken up acting classes to pursue her film career and on the day we speak, it’s announced she’s banked more than £1.3 million, thanks to a new fashion line and range of skincare masks, clothing collections with PrettyLittleThing and JD Sports, and modelling for brands including Adidas and Maybelline.

Jama laughs when I ask her how it feels to be a millionaire at 26, telling me she actually crossed the million pound mark two years ago: “they obviously only just checked my bank account”. She insists she’s never been money-motivated and becoming a millionaire was never her goal, but it feels “nice”. “You do something you enjoy and then you get paid for it and you’re like: ‘Oh my gosh, this is so cool!”.

Jama used some of the money to buy her first home, in South West London, over summer and has shared pictures of its plush white interiors and chic roof terrace on Instagram. She moved in with two single friends over the first lockdown and she’s back with the BFF for round two, cooking, doing “coupley stuff” and - by the looks of Instagram - snapping each other’s best angles (presuming her friend is the photographer behind Jama’s latest shots posing in a Kardashian-style cut-out dress, which have amassed more than 313,000 likes).

Maya Jama - In pictures

©ITV Plc
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Jama teases that her BFF is like a husband and wife rolled into one, which suits her just fine. Until recently, many people largely knew her as the girlfriend of grime superstar Stormzy, who she was in a relationship with for four years. They broke up last year and Jama is happy to finally be getting recognition in her own right. She vows to keep future relationships as private as she can. “It makes me nervous [about] who I’m going to be with next, because if they aren’t in the public eye already, maybe they’re going to be brought into [it],” she said in July.

For now though, she’s not interested in dating. In October, she took part in an on-screen blind date for a Peperami advert but “didn’t go into it thinking [she’d] actually take someone’s number”, and despite her DMs being “flooded” with dating woes from single fans, she prefers to be seen as more of an agony aunt figure. “It’s different for everybody, but I’ve accepted that now isn’t the best time to find somebody,” she tells me, adding quickly: “Also, I’m not actually looking.”

Jama with her ex-boyfriend Stormzy
Jeff Spicer/Getty

If she’s not park or Zoom dating, then, how is she spending her evenings in lockdown? Jama says she is happy with nights in cooking pasta. “I’ve realised I’m not actually moving at the moment,” she says, admitting her step count has plummeted because she doesn’t like walking outside on her own. She’s an ambassador for workout platform Fiit so aims to do at least one home workout a week, but rarely makes the three or four she’s “supposed to do”. Her go-to instructor? Jama is biased - Fiit’s master trainer and podcast host Adrienne Herbert is a good friend. “She knows what she’s doing.”

Evenings are also spent FaceTiming her mother, who is of Swedish descent and raised Jama and her younger brother, Omar, on her own as their Somali father was in and out of jail. Her family still lives in Bristol so they were used to virtual contact long before lockdown, but Jama is hoping she can host her mother and aunties for Christmas in London this year, if restrictions allow. “It would be nice to have them all up here in my home – though I’d need help from them [with the cooking]”. This time, she’s not making any ambitious quarantine goals. “Just maintaining myself, that’s the aim,” says Jama. “If I can remain the same as I was when I went in [to lockdown] then that’s good enough.”

Maya Jama has been challenged by Peperami Chicken Bites to find love at first bite, taking part in a dating experience that matches the superstar with singletons, based on food preference alone. To watch the episode, visit @PeperamiTV on Instagram

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