How Call Her Daddy podcaster Alex Cooper gets celebrities like Charlize Theron to share secrets
Charlize Theron revealed a sex bombshell on the Call Her Daddy podcast, which has turned ‘female locker room talk’ into a multimillion-dollar empire. Alex Cooper’s couch is a confessional.
In an age of near-pathological celebrity caginess in interviews, one woman manages to rack up the scoops over and over again.
That woman is 30-year-old Alex Cooper, host of the podcast Call Her Daddy, and last week she did it again in a frank, wide-ranging conversation with the actress Charlize Theron.
The two got into her guest’s traumatic early life in South Africa (when Theron was 15, her mother shot her alcoholic father dead in self-defence), their respective experiences of sexual harassment, and Theron’s dating life as a 49-year-old single mother.
Which led to the actress’s bombshell disclosure: “I did just recently f*** a 26-year-old. And it was really f***ing amazing.”
Cue many, many headlines about Theron’s venture into cougardom.
With an average audience of ten million per episode, Call Her Daddy claims to be the “most listened-to podcast by women”.
If it was not for a certain Joe Rogan, some weeks it would be the most listened-to podcast full stop.
In 2021, Cooper signed a $60 million deal with Spotify; three years later, she more than doubled that when she signed to SiriusXM for $125 million.
The podcast was launched in 2018 as a joint effort between Cooper and her then co-host (and roommate) Sofia Franklyn.
The pair described their ethos as “female locker room talk” — funny, honest and filthy conversations about life as young women in New York. The title is a play on the idea of calling a male partner “daddy” during sex. (Cooper nicknames herself “father figure” and her audience “the daddy gang”.)
It quickly built a large, mostly female fanbase, but two years later the podcast was on the verge of collapsing.
Contract negotiations with their production company at the time, Barstool Sports, were played out in a series of cryptic episode titles such as “Prisoners of Azkaban” and “It’s Over”; then Cooper and Franklyn fell out, and Cooper became the sole host.
That led to a change in style.
The bawdy talk was supplemented by a focus on therapy and self-improvement, and Cooper began to share the mic with a series of celebrity guests.
The first was Miley Cyrus, who discussed her recent break-up with Liam Hemsworth — and started the Daddy tradition of setting the celebrity news agenda.
Since then, Call Her Daddy has evolved into a slicker beast: during the 2024 US presidential election campaign, Kamala Harris chose to grant the podcast one of her very few long-form interviews.
It might not have swung the vote, but it certainly showed how far Cooper has come since her days of dirty jokes and smutty anecdotes.
Not too far, however — as the Theron episode shows.
WHAT’S THE SECRET?
The secret of Call Her Daddy is that it has the vibe of a chat between girlfriends, even when the girls in question happen to be incredibly successful celebrities and not actually your friends.
Hence Theron feeling comfortable discussing her recent escapades with one-night stands and toyboys.
Altogether, it fits in with the burgeoning mood of female self-assurance when it comes to talking about sex — especially middle-aged women having sex with younger men.
The age gap that Theron got to enjoy for real has been the subject of two movies this year.
BDSM thriller Babygirl starred Nicole Kidman as a high-powered executive embarking on a dangerous fling with a much younger intern, while Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy gave the scenario a rom-com spin, with Renée Zellweger in a tryst with 28-year-old Leo Woodall.
Meanwhile, in bookshops, Miranda July’s dementedly horny All Fours has been flying off the shelves, with its story of a fortysomething female creative embroiled in a passionate crush on a (you guessed it) younger man.
Although it is a work of fiction, some readers have embraced the novel as something more like self-help, with many women claiming that reading it changed their lives — and their attitudes to sex.
What all three share is an unapologetic attitude to female desire.
In 1967’s The Graduate, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) pays for her affair with the younger Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) by losing not only her marriage and status, but her relationship with her daughter. But in 2025, her successors are allowed to have their younger men and their happy endings too (Kidman’s character even gets to watch her husband and her beau wrestle for her).
Still barely out of her twenties (and very happily married, according to her podcast), Cooper herself is unlikely to follow in Theron’s footsteps any time soon. But her delighted, judgment-free response to Theron’s story shows how much space has opened up for “female locker room talk”.
What is behind the rise of dirty girl talk? Part of it can be put down to the fact that we simply live in grubbier times — the most explicit acts have been mainstreamed through internet pornography. If anything, it would be weirder if women were not having these conversations, given how much sex can impinge on our lives.
But women today also have more of the independence that allows for sexual adventure. (Thanks to HRT, they also have more time to enjoy it, and tweakments can further the defiance of age — as luridly illustrated in Babygirl, where we see Kidman under the needle.) When you have made your own fortune, you don’t have to worry about being a nice girl, and Cooper’s success shows that sex sells to women just as much as it ever did to men.
The Sunday Times
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