Nearly one year after Liam Payne died, his former One Direction bandmate Louis Tomlinson is opening up about Payne’s death.
“It was really, really, impossibly difficult for me to deal with losing Liam,” Tomlinson told Rolling Stone UK in an interview published on Tuesday. “Naively, I thought that because at this point, I’m relatively well versed in grief for my age, that it might soften the blow. [That was] super-naive. It’s very different. I’ve never lost a friend before.”
Payne, who was 31, died after he fell from a hotel balcony in Argentina. Tomlinson and their former bandmates Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik all paid tribute to Payne on social media, though they have chosen to keep most details of their grieving processes private.
The band celebrated its 15th anniversary of being formed on The X Factor in July, though Tomlinson admitted that the latest milestone was “really uncomfortable” because he felt it was “more important than ever” to acknowledge it “on behalf of Liam.”
Tomlinson went on to admit that past anniversaries made him feel “sick of nostalgia”, though the latest one was different. “You know, there’s still a level in my head [where it feels] unjust and frustrating that he’s not with us anymore,” he said. “So, it just brought up those feelings, although I’m still living with them anyway.”
According to Tomlinson, Payne was the “safest pair of hands” in the band because he had the most entertainment experience when they were formed. “We were all just so amateur, but he was already where he needed to be by the time he did his first [X Factor] audition,” he recalled. “None of us would have admitted it at the time, because you have a lot of pride as a young lad, but we all looked up to him like that.”
Tomlinson also took the opportunity to defend Payne against judgments made against him in the past, particularly after he made negative comments about his time in One Direction while appearing on a 2022 episode of Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast.
“He was just a very misunderstood person, I think, from a public perspective,” Tomlinson told the outlet of Payne. “If there is ever any judgment on his character, I think nine times out of 10, you can reflect on that, and the reflection is that he was someone who just wanted to be liked.”
The singer added that anyone who knew Payne “personally would know how deeply unfair” the backlash he received after the podcast interview was. “Anything that he got wrong in life, Liam — which, by the way, we all do daily — it was never through malice,” Tomlinson said. “It was only through miscommunication — him just not being able to express himself in the way he needed to.”
Tomlinson also defended Payne in a tribute post shared via Instagram one day after his death. “And for the record, Liam was in my opinion the most vital part of One Direction. His experience from a young age, his perfect pitch, his stage presence, his gift for writing,” he wrote alongside a photo of him and Payne performing on stage. “The list goes on. Thank you for shaping us Liam.”