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15 March 2024, 14:15 | Updated: 15 March 2024, 15:01
Zayn has healed his old wounds from the past and it shows when he so openly and happily talked about his One Direction days on Hot Ones.
Ex-One Directioner Zayn Malik is back in a big way, with the announcement that he’s dropping a new album on the 17th of May, 2024 called ‘Room Under The Stairs' and has just dropped a new single.
Zayn has been relatively camera-shy ever since he left One Direction in 2015, choosing to focus on his mental health, his music exploration as well as his family including ex Gigi Hadid and their daughter Khai. So when it was announced that he would be appearing on Hot Ones with Sean Evans, fans past and present rejoiced!
Real ones know that Zayn’s struggled with conflicted memories of his time in the biggest boy band of our generation, but it seems like time really does heal all because the Zayn in this interview is full of light and happiness as he looks back on those times spent with Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson fondly.
But what exactly does he say about One Direction? Here are all the times he talked about his time in the band during his interview on Hot Ones.
It takes some time for the star to settle in and get comfortable but host Sean knows what he’s doing, so he waited until roughly the halfway mark before asking Zayn about his special Iron Man memorabilia. Something, which let’s be honest, Sean absolutely knew was linked to Zayn’s time with 1D.
Sean wanted Zayn to explain how he got his hands on an original Iron Man comic signed by Stan Lee, so Zayn began to say, “When we did the One Direction Movie, Morgan Spurlock- he filmed a lot of the behind-the-scenes for the film and he directed it. And he became pretty close to us so at the end of the filming process, he bought us all a present.”
“And he brought me a signed Iron Man comic, a Stan Lee signed Iron Man comic which is a real amazing thing that I still have.”
Morgan knew Stan Lee personally at the time after working alongside him, Joss Whedon and Harry Knowles to create a documentary on fandom, specifically convention fans, called Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan's Hope.
Zayn went on to say, “I remember all the boys being super p***** off about it too because they didn’t get as good gifts and they gave me this signed Stan Lee comic book.”
We can imagine Niall and Harry pouting in jealousy and Louis and Liam getting riled up over Zayn's awesome gift, but now we want to know what their gifts were too!
As the interview continued and the wings got hotter and hotter, so did Zayn’s stories. Sean asked him whether he’d ever experienced any memorable tech issues or failures and Zayn launched into an epic story of how he once saved Harry’s life.
“I’ve never actually been burnt by pyro, one time- there’s footage of it and it actually amazing because it makes me look great.”
“But on stage, Harry was right next to a pyro and the pyro was about to go off because they were on timers, and he had a towel over his head, and he had his head over the pyro and he didn’t see that the pyro was there.”
“So I just kind of like came running from one side of the stage and like pushed him out of the way and the pyro just kind of explodes in front of his face, that was really dangerous.”
Someone did film the incident and from the footage, you can see just how close Harry was to burning off his beautiful face.
The most heartwarming part of the interview had to be just after this story when Zayn talked about how he and the boys would deal with power outages during their shows.
Zayn saves Harry from fire and Louis shook #1DWins10s pic.twitter.com/CFWTZVTfRE
— carmen met ben platt 🍯🧠 (@benpIattie) December 15, 2019
“In terms of like technical difficulties, the whole rig would just go off sometimes, like in our early gigs, we would have a power outage and there was no microphones so…,” he told Sean.
“We would just put our microphones down and we would just burst into Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, acapella and just do the whole performance of that until the microphones were working again.”
It’s at this point that Zayn laughed, Sean joined him and you could hear the crew and whoever else is in that room laughing too.
He went on to say, “And that was a thing we had in our back pocket like if the microphones goes, you know we still got that- as if it was some amazing performance but I hope it entertained people… yeah funny times”
We promise you Zayn, the people were entertained, they were so entertained that even now, eight years after you’ve left the band, fans are crying out for a reunion.
With Zayn finally in the public eye again and able to process his time in One Direction, with Liam releasing more music and Louis, Niall and Harry’s careers skyrocketing, we’re just one step closer to getting the reunion we deserve.
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