Hulu‘s new two-part documentary Call Her Alex is a look at the life of Alex Cooper, whose Call Her Daddy podcast has become one of the biggest shows of all time. Though Cooper is open about her life on her podcast, the doc features childhood videos (she was a bit of an auteur behind the camera from a young age), interviews with friends and family, and some incredibly personal stories she’s never getting into before. Though it jumps around a little, veering from concert film to intimate portrait, it’s riveting the whole time.
Opening Shot: Podcaster Alex Cooper walks into her home office in matching Unwell sweats and sits at her desk to do a microphone check, preparing to record an episode of the podcast that made her famous, Call Her Daddy.
The Gist: It’s not as if podcaster Alex Cooper is a closed book, she’s made a name for herself as the No. 1 woman podcaster on Spotify by being just about as open as she can be about her own life, being a sexual advocate, and getting celebrities to to open up about themselves. But in Call Her Alex, she uses the film as a platform to open up in stark detail about some of the biggest traumas of her life, even naming for the first time the soccer coach who sexually harassed her in college, forcing her to quit the sport.
At first, it seems like the documentary is going to simply be a filmed version of her live show with backstage drama, rehearsals, and preparation for the biggest professional undertaking of her career. Cameras capture her as she prepares for her Unwell Tour, the stage show that she and husband Matt Kaplan produced which kicked off in 2023. Scenes of Cooper working through all the show’s pain points are woven with childhood anecdotes and interviews with Cooper, her family, and closest childhood friends about her drive to succeed.
We learn about her childhood – an idyllic and supportive home life, scarred by the bullying she endured at school for her looks – and the fact that she found solace in her basement where she and her friends would make videos daily. Alex became a production whiz (a trait inherited from her dad, who produced the live broadcasts for the Philadelphia Flyers) and a sports phenom, earning a four-year soccer scholarship to Boston University.
The bomb she drops in the first episode is likely to make headlines (as I watched I was like, can they really be saying all of this?): Cooper explains that she was forced to quit the sport after her coach, Nancy Feldman, allegedly sexually harassed her, fixated on her, and controlled aspects of her personal life, threatening to rescind Cooper’s scholarship if she didn’t comply. Feldman’s name and likeness are used liberally in the doc, and Cooper in unequivocal about the lasting pain the coach left her with. When Cooper went to the university with the allegations as a junior, their response was tepid at best, so she quit the team and the school never investigated Feldman further. (Cooper played for B.U. from 2013-2015 and missed her senior year season; Feldman continued to coach there until her retirement in 2022.) This takes up a decent portion of part one of the doc, and it’s clearly still a devastating thing for Cooper to discuss, but one that fueled her.
Part two of the documentary is focused on Call Her Daddy – the evolution of the podcast at Barstool Sports, its Daddy Gang fandom, Cooper’s creative process (we see her prepare for her interview with Kamala Harris, which was probably the biggest interview of her career). It’s much more along the lines of what one would expect to see in this type of documentary, and it doesn’t shy away from the podcast’s ups and downs, including her fallout with her former co-host Sofia Franklyn. Though it’s a bit more generic than the first half – which offers more emotional grit – there are moments, like when she happens to meet the women who live in the apartment where she first started Call Her Daddy while hanging on the stoop – that feel authentic and charming. While it feels like the documentary addresses a LOT of disparate topics and can jump around from one to the next, it will give Cooper’s fans even more to love. I am not a Call Her Daddy listener, but Call Her Alex might have turned me in to one. (I mean, maybe I won’t be one of the screaming throngs at her live show but… you know.)
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Serena Kerrigan’s Peacock series, Older, Hotter, Wiser, is a comedic, scripted look at a podcaster preparing for her first big live stage show. Looking back, you can’t help but think that some of her inspiration had to be taken from Cooper’s Unwell Tour, there are too many uncanny comparisons between the two.
Our Take: Despite Alex Cooper’s fame and success, Call Her Alex reveals that she is not a typical celebrity. Yes, she has a podcast deal worth millions but her empire has been built with the help of people she she knows intimately – childhood friends, her husband, her parents – and she seems to know that it could all crumble if she ever started to act inauthentic. The way this documentary positions the struggles of her youth against her drive to succeed in what’s been considered a man’s space effectively depicts a person who contains multitudes. The sex stuff is one heightened facet of who she is; discussing women’s sexuality helped propel her to fame, but it’s also given her an opportunity to educate and to amplify women’s issues and what people think women should be like.
Cooper is often comedically graphic about intimate moments in her life, but the places that this documentary goes are raw and explore the intimate moments that caused her pain. Rather than laughing about being bullied or her college soccer experience, these things became the fuel she ran on to succeed. While her rift with Sofia Franklyn is addressed head-on, you get the sense that it taught her a lesson about who she wants to keep in her company. There are times when the first half of Call Her Alex seems stuffed a little too much with B-roll of screaming fans at her shows, but when you really get into the meat of it (I feel like Alex would appreciate that double entendre), it’s a compelling profile of a woman who has used her platform to shatter gender norms and expectations.
Sex and Skin: Cooper makes plenty of references to things like blow jobs and vaginas, but there’s nothing explicit onscreen.
Parting Shot: “The minute I left that campus, I was determined to find a way that no one could ever silence me again,” Cooper says, linking her college soccer experience to the reason she decided to become an outspoken media mogul.
Memorable Dialogue: “I feel like you guys kind of know me at this point, right? I have literally detailed what the inside of my vagina looks like to you guys, we’re close like that, Daddy Gang, we’re close,” Cooper says to her adoring fans in the audience of her live show.
Our Call: Call Her Alex is fan service for Call Her Daddy listeners for sure, but there’s no denying that Alex Cooper is a woman who earned success on her own terms, and her story will absolutely appeal even to non-fans. STREAM IT.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.