Louis Tomlinson recently opened up on the 15th anniversary of One Direction’s founding, marking a bittersweet milestone without his late friend Liam Payne.
In an emotional interview with Rolling Stone, Great Britain. Tomlinson shared his struggles with grief, revealing that losing Payne was “impossibly difficult” and brought with it feelings of injustice and frustration.
“It’s very different. I’ve never lost a friend,” Tomlinson said, reflecting on his experiences with loss, including the death of his mother, Johannah Deakin, from leukemia in 2016, and his younger sister Félicité Tomlinson, who accidentally overdosed in 2019.
Despite being “relatively well-versed in grief,” Tomlinson found that losing Payne was a unique and profound challenge.
Tomlinson also paid tribute to Payne’s guidance and leadership within One Direction, describing him as the “safest pair of hands” in the group.
“We were all so amateur, but he was already where he needed to be by the time he did his first [X Factor] audition,” Tomlinson said, emphasizing Payne’s maturity and influence.
Payne’s untimely death on October 16, 2024 shocked fans around the world. The 31-year-old singer fell several floors from a balcony at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while an investigation determined his cause of death was ‘polytrauma’ due to multiple injuries with internal and external bleeding.
A toxicology report revealed traces of alcohol, cocaine and prescription antidepressants in his system at the time of his death.
