Zayn Malik’s full Call Her Daddy interview dropped today, and the singer covered a lot in the one-hour conversation. But one topic he surprisingly gave a lot of detail on is his and Gigi Hadid’s two-and-a-half year old daughter, Khai. Malik also spoke briefly about his c0-parenting relationship with Hadid, revealing he has custody of Khai 50 percent of the time, and there’s no extra supervision following the Yolanda Hadid incident in September 2021.
“Co-parenting is is good,” he said. “Yeah. We have a really good relationship for Khai. She’s the, you know, the main importance. Yeah. So yeah it’s going well. I think, from me [and my perspective], yeah.” He said later that he is “hands on with my child every chance I can be. If I could get 60 percent [of time with her], I would have it, yeah.”
When Malik is with Khai in Pennsylvania, where he lives, he doesn’t work. “The crazy thing is obviously I have her 50 percent of the time, so that time I have with her is so important because I feel like she’s growing up so fast,” he said. “So when I’m with her, I don’t work like at all. I just spend a full day with her doing things that she wants to do like painting, Play-Doh, this, that. Go to the park, go to the theme park, go to the zoo. Like, we just have fun, and I feel like I’ve rekindled my own childhood through her, you know I’m saying? I feel like we get to certain point in in adult life where everything’s kind of vague and gray and boring, and she’s brought that color back for me for sure, yeah.”
He revealed that Khai is already a very impressive singer—so much so that her talent shocks him. “My favorite thing to do with her is she shows a lot of signs of like musical intelligence already,” he began. “So I just love like, playing instruments with her and singing with her. I’ll sing, and she sings along, and she can do like good harmonies and stuff already. And she’s only two and a half, like, and she harmonizes with me well and finishes notes. She can hold them for a long time. I’m like, you might have a bit of ability, you.”
“[She] hit these high notes, like for falsettos. Yeah, it’s crazy. I’m like yo, like whoa. I couldn’t do this at your age. I didn’t speak until I was three. And she remembers full lyrics to songs as well. Like, every word. [She’s] smart. She loves Disney movies, so we sing a lot of Disney songs together and sing like, ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me,’ and stuff. Yeah, she sings really cute.”
Malik shared other traits of hers that she got from him: “I think she’s funny. Like, she’s a bit of a cheeky one. Yeah, she likes to have a bit of a joke and stuff and laugh a lot. She’s chill though, but she loves reading as well, which is something I think she definitely took from me. She just has an affinity for words, like she remembers everything.”
As for why he’s in Pennsylvania with her, it’s to give her and him a little safe space away from all the attention that he and Hadid get as celebrities in a place like New York: “I didn’t want her to have to be like exposed to that [constant paparazzi] because she didn’t choose it, you know, like it was a choice that I made,” he said. “So I was like, we need to get out of here so that she can have some chance of like a normal childhood, you know, where there’s not cameras flashing in affairs constantly.”
With both his and Hadid’s fame, “I’m not necessarily trying to shield her from it because she’s going to know, you know, if she’s going to get to a certain point, she’s going to have a certain level of awareness. She’s going to know what’s going on. I’m just trying to give her an option, you know, so it’s like a choice for her. If she wants to be away from it, she can be out here because I am a famous person, and I get sanctuary, you know, I’m saying so. I feel like she is gonna have a lot of options and whatever she wants to do in her life, obviously I’ll support her for sure, yeah.”
Malik also added that Khai has inspired some new tracks on his upcoming album. “Yeah, my daughter’s mentioned in there a couple of times,” he said.
You can listen to his full interview here.
Senior News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.
