Zayn Malik has spent years treating his private life like a locked drawer, kept shut, politely ignored, occasionally rattled by tabloid curiosity. Which is whyit landed with a faint thud of surprisewhen he turned up on Alex Cooper'sCall Her Daddyand, in the relaxed sprawl of a long-form chat, began talking like a father first and a pop star second.
The headline moment was not a new relationship or a resurrected feud. It was a tooth.
Khai, Malik's five-year-old daughter with his ex-partner, model Gigi Hadid, lost her first tooth, and Malik decided the Tooth Fairy should arrive like a touring act with a budget. 'So I think I gave her a bit too much money from the Tooth Fairy,' he admitted, before revealing the number that made Cooper audibly recoil: '$500.'
Hadid, he said, 'gave me s***' for it. And there, in that blunt little exchange, you could hear the old tension between celebrity privilege and ordinary parenting, the awkward, unavoidable question of how you raise a child 'normally' when nothing around them is remotely normal.
In Malik's telling, the $500 wasn't some mindless flex. He framed it as a collision between his own upbringing and the life Khai has inherited by default.
'It's everything. Even to the degree that, like, you know, I'm raising her in an environment that isn't the same as everybody else's. Her dad is a pop star. Her mom is a model, and certain things that she does in life might not always reflect other people's understanding of reality,' he told Cooper.
There's a self-awareness in that quote that doesn't always survive celebrity interviews. Malik isn't pretending the playing field is level. He's acknowledging that it isn't, and then, crucially, doing what many wealthy parents do: trying to compensate, overcorrect, soften the edges, buy a little magic.
Still, Hadid's reaction makes sense. Parenting isn't only about what youcangive; it's about what you teach. A first tooth is a milestone precisely because it's small. Turning it into a payday risks making the next ones... what, a performance review?
Cooper asked the obvious follow-up, what happens when the second tooth goes? Malik's answer was both comic and telling: next time, he joked, it would be $5. It's the kind of line that lands because it carries an unspoken admission: yes, he knows he overdid it, and yes, he knows the world will judge him either way.
He also shared what he plans to do with that first tooth: 'The first tooth, I'm gonna keep that one and frame it,' he said. There's something oddly tender about the idea, slightly unhinged, perhaps, but tender all the same.
Source: International Business Times UK
