Molly-Mae’s Behind it all: Is Molly’s sadness a sign that influencing has gone too far?

23 January 2025, 14:12 | Updated: 24 January 2025, 18:20

The documentary aims to show the normality beneath the fame but instead, you see a woman who has become strained by success.

For much of the UK, last Friday night came and went as it does on a cold January evening. But not for fans of Molly Mae Hague, the influencer and vlogger with eight million followers on Instagram, who rose to fame on the reality show ‘Love Island’ in 2019 with her former partner, boxer Tommy Fury.

This was the day her documentary, showing a look behind the curtain at the normal girl beneath the glamour, landed on Amazon Prime. As the evening drew in, the Instagram stories began to fill up. Takeaways, slippers, sofas. Up and down the UK, people who hadn’t watched long form television since lockdown put down Tiktok. They were poised and ready.

The documentary revealed more than expected. It showed that within the beautiful, alluring, glittering symbol of success that is Molly Mae, there is a nagging strain of loneliness and sadness, her life tainted by the pressures of social media and evergrowing beauty standards that she herself perpetuates.

Molly’s regular vlogs have documented her heartbreak and her life as a single mum to her and Tommy’s daughter Bambi after the news broke last summer that the couple had broken up. Investigative fans felt that Molly’s Instagram post announcing the breakup suggested that Tommy had cheated. Fury has categorically denied any allegations of infidelity.

He has been open about struggling with alcohol abuse and the problems this caused in the relationship are mentioned in the documentary. Molly said that she felt “traumatised” and couldn’t “look forward to anything”; on the day of her sister Zoe’s wedding she “pleaded” with him not to drink.

We watch Molly call him whilst he puts their baby to bed as she has her makeup done for a photo shoot. Molly tells us that the only way she could leave the relationship was to post a statement on Instagram: ‘Otherwise I knew I wouldn‘t leave.’ This appeared to reveal how little freedom she has in her life, due to everything she does being watched so closely by her millions of followers, and the press.

It is a tale that has become very familiar, a famous woman left isolated. Despite the massive house and the millions of pounds, Molly seems vulnerable and unhappy. The more we watch, the more the veil of glamour slips away.

Molly’s grandma appears in the first episode and we learn that, when Molly was younger, she called her vain for ‘looking in the mirror all the time.’ This was merely scoffed at by Molly and her mum. Old, doddery grandma. How ridiculous and trivial. Have you seen Molly’s house, her car, her life? Who cares about vanity? Is that even a real thing anymore?

For a second, Molly’s grandma broke the fourth wall. She is from a different time, before 24/7 selfies and bikini pictures, when looking in the mirror was the only real way people saw themselves and doing this all the time would have been a serious cause for concern. But ultimately what she saw as vanity seems to have been part of how her granddaughter built a career and unimaginable wealth after she spent her adolescence creating outfit and makeup videos for her YouTube channel which ‘got her noticed’ by Love Island.

In 2025, being vain has been completely normalised; in fact, the word has almost disappeared among teenagers and young adults. Selfies and videos of makeup and outfits flood girls’ social media around the world and are now viewed as ‘content’. Being an influencer has become a sought-after career. In the documentary's ad breaks, Molly flogs skincare, makeup, and clothes through advertisements for brands like L’Oreal Paris and LookFantastic.

Girls around the UK consume these adverts and the pressure builds on them to, well, look fantastic and be successful like Molly Mae. She is a medium used by big brands to sell products. Yes, she has lots of money and become wildly successful, but in many ways, her documentary seemed to show her being pressured and trapped by extreme expectations, like so many other women.

At the end of episode two, Molly was left having a panic attack at her clothing launch, whilst clones of her, those whom she has influenced, queued up outside to meet her. The more you watched the more it seemed like she may have been happier with a more normal, more private and, well, less vain existence.

The next episodes of Molly Mae: Behind it All, will be out in the spring.

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Emily Conn is a producer at LBC.

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