Call Her Daddy Host Alex Cooper & Her Gorgeous Transformation

It's not easy to make an impression as a podcaster these days, what with the inherent challenge of standing out from the zillions of podcasts available. Which is why one really has to hand it to "Call Her Daddy" podcast host Alex Cooper. Lauded by Rolling Stone as the Gen-Z version of legendary interviewer Barbara Walters, Cooper sits down with A-list stars and asks the questions her listeners would if they could. It's a strategy that has paid off handsomely, catapulting her into the upper echelons of the media business as she embarks on her ambitious quest to become a media mogul in her own right. 

The popularity of "Call Her Daddy" cannot be underestimated. Not only does the podcast attract an average audience of 5 million listeners for each weekly episode, it's also become an important destination for musicians. According to Variety, recording artists who appear on "Call Her Daddy" regularly see huge increases in streaming numbers for their music; Anitta, for example, saw her streaming increase by 155% after her sit-down with Cooper, while singer and guitarist John Mayer's appearance on the podcast preceded a whopping 350% jump in his streaming numbers.

As her star continues to rise thanks to a high-profile gig covering the 2024 Paris Olympics, read on to learn all about "Call Her Daddy" host Alex Cooper and her gorgeous transformation.

Alex Cooper's rise is impressive, but it's fair to say that it hasn't exactly been of the rags-to-riches variety. Born on August 21, 1994, she was raised in Newton, an affluent suburb of Pennsylvania. Both of Cooper's parents held high-paying jobs: her mother is a psychologist, and her father works in television production, focusing on sporting events such as NHL hockey games. 

As a youngster, Cooper went to a posh private school, and grew up never lacking for anything. That said, she didn't exactly feel like Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins when compared to her classmates at the exclusive Pennington School. "I was constantly aware of money growing up," Cooper explained in a 2024 interview with The New York Times. "I remember, of my friends around me, I was considered the poorest."

That feeling of financial inferiority no doubt fueled the competitive streak that's been Cooper's hallmark throughout her life, and has taken her to heights she likely never could have imagined. "I am so competitive," she admitted in a 2022 interview with New York Times Magazine. "I push myself to be the best I can."

Alex Cooper's competitive streak was also evident in her interest in athletics, specifically soccer. "My family is a sports family," she explained during an appearance on "Late Night with Seth Meyers." "My dad played Division I hockey at Wisconsin. My mom was an equestrian. Both of my siblings played sports," she told The New York Times Magazine.

Cooper's talent at soccer led to scholarship offers to some of America's top colleges, but she decided against an Ivy League school in order to play Division I soccer at Boston University. "I love soccer and the level of soccer at Ivy League colleges is not comparable to D-One," the teenager explained in a 2013 interview with The Trentonian. After graduating from high school, Cooper received a full scholarship to BU. 

Her soccer career, however, came to an inglorious end after an undisclosed incident involving one of her coaches. As Cooper told Cosmopolitan, the experience had left her with so much lingering trauma that she was still unable to address it publicly — although she was gearing up to do just that, eventually. That incident, she told the Times, had fundamentally changed her. "It made me a stronger person," she said, detailing how the experience had forced her to develop her own confidence and resilience. Without offering details, Cooper revealed she didn't play at all during her senior year, but kept her scholarship. "That can kind of indicate where the wrong was done," she hinted. 

After graduating with a degree in film and television, Alex Cooper moved to New York, where she was trying to break into that field while paying her rent by selling ads for Gotham magazine. That was when she came upon the idea of starting a podcast. "I had never heard a podcast when I first started — I was just going off of what I felt I wanted to listen to," she told the Los Angeles Times. She teamed up with her roommate at the time, Sofia Franklyn, for a new podcast that they titled "Call Her Daddy." As Cooper told Vanity Fair, the title came from a t-shirt she regularly wore in college that bore those words, enjoying the uncomfortable reactions it evoked in men. "They'd be frustrated, and I could tell it was because I shouldn't have this on my chest," she said. "They're like, 'We're Daddy.' And I'm like, 'No, I'm Daddy.'"

From the get-go, Cooper and Franklyn served up raw, raunchy and unvarnished conversations on sex and relationships. "It's kind of locker room talk but for chicks," Cooper described the show in one episode. "I want to own it and do it better," she told Time.

That approach resonated with female listeners, and "Call Her Daddy" began attracting an audience. "It's interesting to hear sex talked about in such an honest way from a women's perspective," 19-year-old fan Addison Rose told The New York Times in 2020. "It was refreshing."

The burgeoning popularity of "Call Her Daddy" captured the attention of Barstool Sports, a digital media company focusing on sports, founded by social media personality Dave Portnoy. Within weeks of the podcast's 2018 debut, the duo signed a three-year deal with Barstool Sports to host the podcast, initially paying them $75,000 per year.

While a female-driven podcast on the male-centric Barstool Sports platform seemed counterintuitive, Cooper wrote a brief blog post explaining why it was a better fit than may have been immediately apparent. "How did a D1 athlete and an economics major who quit her job on Wall Street end up at Barstool?" Cooper wrote. "Well, Barstool liked our idea of uncensored, real, female locker room talk which quite frankly is just as nasty as guy locker room talk. And we had no problem exploiting our experiences — as well as ourselves — for our listeners' entertainment."

Within a span of just two months after coming to Barstool Sports, "Call Her Daddy" exploded, steamrolling from 12,000 downloads per episode to 2 million. That sudden and dramatic increase in popularity, however, would eventually prove to be a catalyst for a major rift between Cooper and Sofia Franklyn.

As the success of "Call Her Daddy" increased, by 2020 Alex Cooper began to feel it had outgrown Barstool Sports, and that bigger opportunities beckoned. She and Sofia Franklyn were still in the midst of their three-year deal when they began efforts to unleash themselves from Barstool Sports. What began with cryptic clues became open warfare when they essentially went on strike by refusing to produce new episodes of "Call Her Daddy." 

Meanwhile, the New York Post reported that another fight was brewing, this one between Cooper and Franklyn. "They're not speaking to each other anymore," a source told the Post. "They've completely turned on each other and started arguing over who was the real talent and who did more of the heavy lifting [for the podcast]." On top of that, noted The New York Times, Barstool Sports head honcho Dave Portnoy posted a scathing episode accusing the two of trying to illegally exit their contract with him, characterizing them as "unprofessional, disloyal and greedy."

Franklyn subsequently told Rolling Stone that she'd wanted to stick with Barstool Sports while Cooper wanted to pursue more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. When the dust settled, Cooper split with Franklyn. In May 2020, Cooper announced that she'd be taking full control of "Call Her Daddy," and had signed a new solo deal for the podcast with Barstool Sports.

After taking the reins of "Call Her Daddy," Alex Cooper began shifting the podcast into a different direction that placed less emphasis on raunch. As she explained in a 2023 interview with Rolling Stone, she'd started to feel that the graphic sex talk that put the podcast on the map had pretty much run its course. "Eventually, towards the end, I was like, 'I am going to lose my mind if we have to do one more sex segment and pretend we had sex this week,'" she admitted, fearing that she'd painted herself into a corner. "I resented the character that I had built," she said.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. While self-isolating, she took a hard look at what she'd already achieved with "Call Her Daddy" and where she ultimately wanted to take it. "The pandemic hit and ... I think I could feel I wanted to shift the content," she said while appearing on a panel at Spotify Beach in Cannes, as reported by Page Six. As she explained, she felt frustrated that the podcast's sex-centric focus had pigeonholed her. "I was a Division I athlete, I went to college, I studied film and communications," she added. "There was more I wanted to discuss."

And thus began the shift from the old-school "Call Me Daddy" toward the current celebrity-heavy version — and even bigger success.

Alex Cooper's instincts to shift the focus of "Call Her Daddy" away from strictly sex paid off with a big bump in listenership. "People will tell me they miss the old 'Call Her Daddy,' but that show was dying," Cooper told the Los Angeles Times. "It was like, 'How many times can we talk about sex?'" she added, admitting that she was finding herself growing bored with the content that she was creating.

As the numbers continued to grow due to the podcast's evolved format, so too did the opportunities. That came into focus in 2021, when Variety reported that Cooper entered a $60 million deal with Spotify to become the exclusive carrier of the podcast for three years. "I want to be the biggest podcast in the world," she declared in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

That payday was so significant that she immediately became the highest-paid female podcaster in history — and the second highest-paid podcaster ever, after only Joe Rogan (who'd previously signed on with Spotify for a reported $200 million). While she wasn't making Rogan-level money, Cooper was nonetheless triumphant that she'd entered the big leagues. "A woman just got what in the past would've been a male contract," she boasted to the Times.

Entering a $60 million deal with Spotify would seemingly satisfy the ambitions of most podcasters, but it was only a warmup for Alex Cooper. In June 2023, she and then-fiancé Matt Kaplan co-founded Trending, a new media company targeting Gen Z that was described in Variety as being "committed to elevating today's voices and crafting tomorrow's stories for an independent, resourceful and inclusive generation." Just two months later, Variety reported on Cooper's next big move, the formation of her own production company. A subsidiary of Trending, this new venture — dubbed The Unwell Network — was launched to produce content on various platforms for other rising stars.

Cooper's first two acquisitions were canny, and certainly fit the brand: social media phenom Alix Earle and British TikTok sensation Madeline Argy. According to the announcement, the plan was for both women to launch their own podcasts under the Unwell banner. Weeks later, Argy announced the launch of her solo podcast, "Pretty Lonesome." About a week later, Earle followed suit with her own offering, "Hot Mess with Alix Earle."

The Unwell Network wasn't just a way for Cooper to lift up new voices, but also to lighten her own load. "The goal as I get older is I don't want to just be relying on 'Alex Cooper' and 'Call Her Daddy.' The point of starting this was also so that I have all these different ancillary businesses that can be running," she told The New York Times in 2024.

After launching The Unwell Network, Alex Cooper did something she'd never done before: take "Call Her Daddy" on the road for a brief concert tour. During the fall of 2023, Cooper embarked on the seven-date Unwell Tour, which brought her to Nashville, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, and New York City's legendary Madison Square Garden. Each stop featured Cooper schmoozing with a different celebrity guest (her Boston date, for example, featured comedian/"Summer House" alum Hannah Berner) and cavorting with shirtless male dancers.

Described by The New York Times as "one-woman shows wrapped in a rowdy bachelorette party," Cooper's live dates brought her into contact for the first time with the fans she'd lovingly dubbed her "Daddy Gang," and they turned out in force to see her in person. Not surprisingly, the live shows took on a circus-like atmosphere that was a world apart from the intimate interviews for which Cooper had come to be known. "There's a call to action to have fun and party," Cooper's business partner and then-fiancé Matt Kaplan told the Times. "No one wants to come to the 'Call Her Daddy' tour and just, like, listen."

The experience of meeting all her fans en masse was an emotional one, for both Cooper and Kaplan. "I started to cry the first night, and so did she," he said. "Alex has worked so hard to have an authentic relationship with these women."

When she extricated herself from Barstool Sports and made her historic deal with Spotify, she was Alex Cooper was guided by her future husband Matt Kaplan. In April 2023, she and Kaplan tied the knot, exchanging vows in Mexico's Riviera Maya during an exotic destination wedding. Listeners of "Call Her Daddy" knew Kaplan as "Mr. Sexy Zoom Man," the podcast nickname she'd given him due to the way they'd met, via a Zoom meeting. 

Interviewed by W Magazine, Cooper admitted she'd always been dubious about the entire prospect of marriage — until Kaplan came along. "Growing up, I never wanted to conform to something that society is telling us: to get married to a man and live happily ever after," she said, pointing out that many marriages aren't healthy for either partner. "But with Matt, it immediately was obvious to me, once our relationship progressed to the point that it was time, that yes, I would love to marry him."

It was Kaplan's ongoing support for her career, Cooper explained, that was the real deciding factor that convinced her Kaplan was husband material. "A lot of men in my past were really intimidated by my success," she said. "It's very attractive to have a man not be intimidated by a woman's extreme success."

Many members of Alex Cooper's "Daddy Gang" have been following her for years, but even the most hardcore didn't know how to respond when she revealed her skincare regimen — which is unorthodox, to say the least. 

Speaking with Vogue in June 2024, Cooper detailed her struggles with oily skin and acne, and the steps she'd taken to address that. "I don't wash my face. No, please don't judge me," she said. "I just realized that like early on when I was breaking out a lot, my skin was super oily and it was confused and I was struggling a lot with my skincare and when I stopped washing my face, all of a sudden, I stopped having pimples."

So, should others plagued with similar issues follow suit and stop cleansing their faces as well? Not necessarily, according to Lucie Royer, director of Skin & Soul Medical. "Washing your face at least once a day is super important because it helps remove dirt, oil, and impurities that build up on your skin throughout the day," Royer told Betches, explaining that not washing will result in oil and dead skin building up, leading pores to become clogged and skin to break out.

Having conquered the world of podcasting, Alex Cooper put herself forward for a whole new challenge when she signed on with NBCUniversal to take part in coverage of the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris for the media conglomerate's streaming service, Peacock. "As a former athlete, the chance to cheer on the world's greatest athletes at the Olympics is beyond thrilling," said Cooper in a statement about hosting her live-streamed interactive watch parties, "Watch with Alex Cooper," via a press release from NBC Sports. "We are going to have so much fun." 

Appearing on NBC's "Late Night with Seth Meyers," Cooper revealed that she had a familial connection to the Olympics. Her father, a TV producer specializing in sports, had worked on coverage of previous games. In addition, her sister is an editor who worked on the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. "If anything, I'm the last person in the family to do the Olympics," she joked. 

During that appearance, Cooper also offered a sneak peek at what viewers could expect to see her doing on Peacock. "It's basically going to be me watching the Olympics live, with celebrities, and comedians, and friends," she added. "The fans can interact. It's gonna be a great time." Call her sporty.