Famously press-shy Zayn Malik shares rare One Direction anecdotes on Hot Ones

Though he has continued releasing music, Zayn Malik never fit the mold of a typical pop star—that’s one of the reasons he left One Direction in the first place. He doesn’t do much press anymore, nor does he seem to like performing live all that much. In fact, he spends much of his Hot Ones interview talking about his chill life on his Pennsylvania farm, growing 40-pound watermelons, cooking tandoori chicken, and sneaking vegetables into his daughter’s food. But he does, somewhat unprompted, share a few rare positive anecdotes about his 1D experience that are sure to delight fans.

Having been warmed up, quite literally, with a few spicy wings, Malik first broached the subject in regards to a gift he received from One Direction: This Is Us director Morgan Spurlock. “[He] became pretty close to us, so at the end of the filming process he brought us all a present, and he brought me a signed Iron Man comic, a Stan Lee signed Iron Man comic, which is a really amazing thing that I still have on my wall,” the singer shared. His “geeky nerdy friends” are still jealous, but so were Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan, and Liam Payne. “I remember the other boys being super pissed off about it too because they didn’t get as good gifts and he gave me this signed Stan Lee comic,” Malik recalled. “I was like, this is fucking sick.”

Surprisingly, the fond memories didn’t stop there. He also spoke about saving Styles from a pyrotechnic display at one of their concerts (“there’s footage of it and it’s actually amazing ’cause it makes me look great”) and the band’s backup plan if they ever had technical difficulties. “The whole rig would go off sometimes, like in our early gigs we would have a power outage and there was no microphones. So we would just put our microphones down and we would just burst into ‘Fresh Prince Of Bel Air’ a cappella, and just do the whole performance of that until the microphones were working again,” Malik said. “And that was the thing that we had just in our back pocket, ‘If the microphone goes, you know, we still have that,’ as if it was some amazing performance. But I hope it entertained people. Yeah, funny times.”

Funny times! If you are a true Directioner, you know how remarkable it is for Zayn to be sharing 1D stories in a positive light. In the scattering of press he has done since leaving the band, he was typically negative about the band, the kind of music they made, his relationships with the other members, and the experience as a whole. Some of the negativity was warranted; he has said he suffered a lot of anxiety being at the center of Beatlemania-esque hysteria, developed an eating disorder, and as the group’s only non-white member, also experienced a fair amount of racism. But of course, some of it was the typical petty mudslinging that happens when boy bands fall apart.

Even as recently as last year, Malik was frank about competition within the band being one of the reasons he left. On the Call Her Daddy podcast (at the time, his first interview in six years), he said that “there was a lot of politics going on” and “some people didn’t want to sign contracts” to continue 1D, and he “completely selfishly wanted to be the first person to go and make my own record,” so he left first. But that July 2023 interview did mark a softening of his previous anti-1D agenda: “I look back on it now in a much fonder light than I would’ve as I’d just left,” he said. “There were great experiences, I had great times with them, but we’d just run our course.”

If you’re not a Directioner, don’t care about any of this lore, and just came here because you’re a Hot Ones fan, well, how about this? Malik, who also grows chili peppers on his farm (Scotch bonnets and Carolina Reapers), brought his own hot sauce to the show for host Sean Evans to try. In Evans’ expert opinion, Malik is a “natural talent” and his sauce is “actually elite.” What can’t he do?