From Soccer Star to Podcast Powerhouse

Superstar podcaster Alex Cooper (Call Her Daddy) follows in the footsteps of other attractive, charismatic young women who made a splash with something they wrote or recorded, leading to magazine profiles, chat show appearances, and in some cases, even endorsement deals.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was novelists like Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York) and Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation). Then, in the 2000s, the internet made it easier than ever for creators to reach audiences directly, leading to bloggers, like Julie Powell, who turned her entries into a book (Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen). In all three instances, their bestsellers were adapted into motion pictures, most notably Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia.

Then came podcasts, and that’s how the now 30-year-old Cooper made her mark, though her life story wasn’t turned into a movie, but rather a Ry Russo-Young-directed documentary on Hulu.

As a framing device, Nuclear Family’s Russo-Young uses Cooper’s 2023 six-city Unwell tour. Otherwise, she moves chronologically through her subject’s life. From a young age, Cooper was athletic and camera-friendly, inspired by her father’s hobby as a videographer and career as a TV sports producer for the Philadelphia Flyers. Though she looks cute in photos and videos, she says other kids made fun of her red hair, which may explain why she reinvented herself as a blonde.

Before she turned to podcasting, Cooper tried and failed to make it as an actress in New York, so she turned to YouTube, but her vlogging didn’t exactly set the world on fire, so she launched a racy podcast about sex with her roommate, Sofia Franklyn. The ladies favored an overtly sexual look, which Cooper has since abandoned, but not until sometime after Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports signed them to a three-year, $70,000-per-year contract. Since that time, a number of even better deals have come along.

Unfortunately, the tour rehearsal material isn’t especially compelling, and starts to feel like padding after a while, though it does provide some surface-level insights into her working relationships with her husband and business partner, film producer Matt Kaplan (Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before), and her podcast producer and childhood best friend, Lauren McMullen.

For the first 43 minutes, it all feels like a puff piece until Cooper talks about her experience with the head women’s soccer coach (now retired) at Boston University. The documentary, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, represented the first time she has spoken about it in public.

Cooper may have felt unattractive as a child, but she grew into a striking young woman, and her coach became obsessed. Granted, Russo-Young only presents one side of the story, but it seems like a clearcut case of sexual harassment. Despite Cooper’s best efforts, it would lead to the end of her soccer career and the beginning of another career, centered on interpersonal relationships.

After watching this 115-minute documentary, inexplicably divided into two parts, I still don’t quite understand Cooper’s phenomenal appeal to Gen Z (Lana Wilson’s more insightful 2023 Hulu documentary on Brooke Shields, on the other hand, makes perfect sense as a two-parter).

Though her fans, known as the Daddy Gang, might not be familiar with Cosmopolitan publisher Helen Gurley Brown, Cooper has styled herself as a Gurley Brown for a new era by encouraging women to “go for it” (whatever “it” is) and also, perhaps unrelatedly, to learn how to give spectacular blow jobs. She also swears a lot, which may be why so many young women see her as an unfiltered big sister.

So, it’s a cult of personality, but that doesn’t make her a cult leader, though her brand of feminism becomes more regressive the longer you look at it. If anything, I was more impressed by her tireless work ethic and MBA-level business acumen as her contracts have gotten bigger and bigger, culminating in 2024’s $125 million deal with SiriusXM, the longtime home of Howard Stern.

All of this might be more interesting if it didn’t feel as if Cooper were calling all the shots. Russo-Young, for instance, neglects to interview Sofia Franklyn, with whom Cooper severed all relations after a contract dispute, or to reference Dave Portnoy’s checkered past, including a history of racist comments, rape jokes, and sexual abuse allegations. In light of Cooper’s experience with sexual harassment, the absence of this context does neither director nor subject any favors.

As of 2025, Alex Cooper is the highest-paid female podcaster ever with a roster of guests that includes Miley Cyrus, Jane Fonda, and Kamala Harris. Hers is a remarkable achievement in light of all the competition, though it’s hard to shake the idea that her impressionable female fans will move on from “Call Her Daddy” after a while, either to something brighter and shinier or possibly even to something more substantial, like, say, their own unique thoughts and ideas, but Cooper is unlikely to go away anytime soon, since her Unwell empire has grown to include seven other podcasts, sports drinks, and the production of a reality show for, you guessed it, Hulu.

Call Her Alex is not without merit, but it’s more about the origins of a brand — and building that brand — than discovering the truth behind a personality.