Katy Perry & Niall Horan
Image Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
This unlikely duo have been friends since 2010, when Perry was a judge on X-Factor. She made the deciding vote that allowed him to continue to the next round, and the rest was history.
During the 2012 MTV Music Video Awards, they shared an on-stage smooth. The former One Direction member later said, “I don’t think there will ever be anything cooler than kissing her… until I marry her, maybe,” per E! News.
In June 2017, the “Teenage Dream” singer opened up about her relationship with Horan in an Australian morning radio show, per Entertainment Tonight. “I see [Niall] around all the time. He’s always trying to like, get my number, to like, maybe flirt with me but I’m like, ‘I could babysit you. I’m like your mom!’”
All jokes aside, she adores him. “Niall’s amazing, I love him, and I think we feel very connected in a way because I, like, helped him get through The X Factor to join his group,” she continued. “He’s become a big star and I’m like, ‘Cool, I guess that means I have taste?’ I don’t know what that means.”
Horan praised Perry in a Feb. 2023 interview on The Late Late Show with James Corden, where he recalled first meeting her on X-Factor. “The whole time I’m walking onto the stage, and I’m just thinking like, ‘That’s Katy Perry. That’s Simon Cowell,’” he said, per PEOPLE. “The whole thing, it looked like a postcard. It didn’t feel like it was real because I watched the show for so long on TV.”
“And Katy was at [her] peak, if we’re talking like Teenage Dream, five No. 1s that year. It was 2010 or 2009, whatever it was. So I was just blown away by that firstly.”
Then Perry gave him that deciding “yes” vote. Horan gushed, “She saves me. And it was just mind-boggling. Little did I know what was to come afterwards. But if it wasn’t for Katy… When we see each other still we have an embrace of thanks.” So sweet!