There’s a moment in “Hurry Up Tomorrow” — the new film that arrives in theaters on May 16, co-written, produced by, and starring the R&B singer the Weeknd, whose given name is Abel Tesfaye — in which Anima, a mysterious character played by Jenna Ortega, whacks the singer over the head with a bottle of champagne, knocking him out cold.
“That’s my girlfriend’s favorite scene,” Mr. Tesfaye said.
The film is a cinematic roman à clef. It tells the story of a superstar called the Weeknd, known for his melancholic music and reclusive personality, who is on a massive stadium tour, pumping himself up with drugs, booze and other assorted trappings of fame. (Barry Keoghan plays his best friend.) When the star loses his voice onstage, it sets off his descent into surrealistic madness.
In 2022, at the end of his first stadium tour, the IRL Weeknd, a superstar known for his moody music, obsessive privacy and openness about past drug and alcohol abuse, lost his voice while performing at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. He has said that the incident triggered a mental breakdown and inspired a personal reckoning.
His sixth studio album, also titled “Hurry Up Tomorrow” — written as he shot the film in 2023— came out earlier this year. Mr. Tesfaye said it will be his last release as the Weeknd. The singer, now 35, is not planning to quit making music. He’s just retiring the persona that has been his musical home since he dropped out of high school in Toronto and started putting out mixtapes online.
“My voice failing me, or me failing my voice, however you want to look at it — I really felt like I went up there and my body was telling me to sit down, it was telling me, you have nothing else to say,” he said, as his dogs, a Doberman named Caesar and a Cane Corso called Zelda, sat nearby on opposite sides of the tennis court at the singer’s Bel Air mansion in Los Angeles.
In the film, Ms. Ortega strikes Mr. Tesfaye the morning after they spend an ecstatic night together, when the intimacy and openness the singer displayed the previous evening have been replaced by an aloof coolness (to reveal more specifics would be an unforgivable spoiler). This is the first act of explicit violence in the film, signaling a shift in tone from taut psychological thriller to something closer to true horror.
The movie’s director, Trey Edward Shults, whose last film, “Waves” (2019), is about a Florida family nearly undone by tragedy, said viewers would be impressed by Mr. Tesfaye’s performance. “I don’t think anyone has a clue of his talent as an actor yet. I think people are going to be shocked,” Mr. Shults said. He also called Mr. Tesfaye a trusted friend, humble and “just a good human being, a very genuine person.”
“Abel is not only really sweet but really professional,” said Ms. Ortega. She was drawn to the project in part because of how “passionate” Mr. Tesfaye was about making this film during such a “significant” and “vulnerable” moment in his career, she added.
Mr. Schultz said that “Hurry Up Tomorrow” is meant to have “the soul and emotion of an opera.” But the meta implications vis-à-vis the Weeknd’s larger story are unavoidable.
Mr. Tesfaye has always had a reputation for elusiveness. After putting out the 2011 mixtape “House of Balloons,” it was months before anyone knew what he looked like. Even as he transformed from an up-and-comer to one of the best-selling artists of all time, he steered clear of most press and kept appearances at public events short. (The Weeknd has sold an estimated 75 million records worldwide, was one of Spotify’s most streamed artists globally in 2024, and his 2019 single “Blinding Lights” led Billboard’s Top Hot 100 Songs of the 21st Century.)
Once he became involved in high-profile romances, with the model Bella Hadid, first spotted together in 2015, and with the actress Selena Gomez in 2017, Mr. Tesfaye became a frequent target of paparazzi, intensifying his commitment to privacy.
In the summer of 2023, the singer’s reputation took a hit with the release of “The Idol,” a HBO series about a pop singer (Lily-Rose Depp) who gets involved with an abusive and sleazy schemer played by Mr. Tesfaye. The production was plagued with behind-the-scenes drama and was canceled after one season. Though “The Idol,” like so many of the Weeknd’s videos and lyrics, portrays a lurid take on fame, glamour, drugs and sex, it was “meant to be satire,” the singer said. But the end result was a sense that art was imitating life.
“Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which Mr. Schultz and Mr. Tesfaye began working on before “The Idol” was even released, has offered an opportunity to reset.
“Failure is the best school,” Mr. Tesfaye said. “This film is emotionally cathartic. It brought the love back, the joy back into what I always loved about film.”
“110 Percent on This Thing”
To hear Mr. Tesfaye tell it, he’s been failing from the beginning.
The singer grew up in Scarborough, Ontario, a city on the outskirts of Toronto. His parents emigrated from Ethiopia in the late ’80s, but he was primarily raised by his mother. He was a restless student and left home when he was 17, convincing his best friend, La Mar Taylor — now the Weeknd’s creative director, and co-founder of his record label — to join him in downtown Toronto.
For several years, Mr. Tesfaye worked retail jobs in Toronto while he made music at home, releasing a handful of tracks that wove indie rock, new wave and hip-hop influences into an atmospheric R&B base, but only told a few close friends that he was behind the songs. Then, in 2009, when he was 19, he heard his music being played by a fellow employee at the American Apparel store where he was working.
“Somebody was playing the song I recorded and enjoying it,” he said. “That was all the validation I needed to just drop everything and focus 110 percent on this thing.”
But translating the pleasure of seamless communication with an audience — not to mention coming out from behind the mask of anonymity and allowing people to pair his face with his sound — was a harder task.
In 2011, fellow Canadian R&B genre-blender Drake featured the Weeknd’s vocals on his album “Take Care” and took him out on tour. The following year, the Weeknd teamed with Republic Records, a division of Universal Music Group, with his own imprint, XO, and put out his official major label debut, “The Trilogy,” a remastered compilation of his earlier mixtapes.
The first time Mr. Tesfaye boarded a plane, he said, it was to fly to California for Coachella, which was his first high-profile U.S. show.
“Nightmare,” he recalled, shaking his head. “It was live-streamed, recorded on HD, and you could hear and see everything. And if you know anything about the Weeknd at the time I was kind of hiding myself. Nobody really knew what I looked like. I didn’t really have a personality.”
Suddenly, everything anyone could see about him was reflected back, in high definition, without his consent and without his control. “The nerves were just unbearable,” he said. “That’s when I started drinking to relax.”
That’s also when he decided to transform himself into someone he could stand to see onstage. Over the next several years, he moved from an uncertain, insecure, shy upstart to one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His music and videos had always conveyed a dark sexuality and explored to the point of glamorizing the caricature of the rock star, but he didn’t have that life. Then, he did.
In 2015, the Weeknd played Coachella again, this time in the company of Ms. Hadid, a rumored romantic interest at the time, beginning his life as a tabloid fixture. He released five studio albums in less than 10 years, achieving both endurance and breadth of influence on the charts.
In 2021, when “After Hours,” his most influential and commercially successful record received zero Grammy nominations, the Weeknd announced his intention to boycott the awards, a declaration that arrived shortly after he headlined the Super Bowl halftime show.
(Earlier this year he made a surprise appearance at the Grammys, ending his beef with the Recording Academy and noting that there have been meaningful shifts in policy around transparency in the nominating process. “I’ve got no beef, it was so long ago, and they did a lot of changes, I mean, we got under the hood,” he said.)
By 2021, he began work on the ultimate dream: his HBO show, “The Idol,” and his first stadium tour, set to start after the bulk of the show finished shooting. It didn’t work out that way.
Deadline reported that the show’s original director, Amy Seimetz (“The Girlfriend Experience”) left the production amid reports that Mr. Tesfaye felt her vision showcased too much of a “female perspective.” Rolling Stone published an expose about the production, which was now being directed by Sam Levinson of “Euphoria” fame, which a trailer billed as “the sleaziest love story in all of Hollywood.”
“The Idol” press coverage suggested Mr. Tesfaye had more in common with the character he played than he would want you to believe.
“At that time, in my world, I had been seasoned, you know? I’d been able to control my work. But when you come into another house, you gotta take your shoes off and be respectful. And if you don’t take your shoes off, you are so easily labeled a tyrant, difficult,” he said.
He added: “I think ‘difficult’ is probably the worst word in Hollywood. You don’t want to be difficult. And even though you’re looking at everything that is going on and it’s like, I’m gonna have diarrhea right now because my instincts are saying things are off, you have to trust the professionals, the system. You have to see it through to the end. It was unfortunate.”
But the controversy renewed conversations that had emerged earlier in the Weeknd’s career about whether the dark sexuality of his lyrics veered into misogynistic fantasy, and the delays caused the show’s shooting schedule to back up against his tour. Soon, Mr. Tesfaye was playing arenas and filming a TV series at the same time, flying back and forth across the country from show dates to shoot in Los Angeles.
On Sept. 2, 2022, the Weeknd performed the first of two shows at SoFi Stadium, the final dates on the tour.
“I don’t know if you ever finished ‘Idol,’” Mr. Tesfaye said, with a good-natured smirk, during the conversation at his home in Los Angeles.
“I don’t know if you got to the end yet, but I’ll help you out: By the end, our main character, Jocelyn is in a stadium in front of a crowd of people giving a speech. That was a real stadium. We shot right before I went onstage the first night. Lily did her speech to a confused audience. They thought that was part of the show,” he said.
Mr. Tesfaye then went out and performed as the Weeknd for two hours. After the stadium emptied out, he put on his character’s rat tail wig and went out onto the empty stage to shoot the show for “for another three or four hours.”
The next night, in the middle of his set, the singer heard a pop. Doctors confirmed that his vocal cords were strained, but he noted that the injury was mainly due to psychological stress.
“A Love Letter to My Fans”
Though Mr. Tesfaye can seem self-serious and remote, in person he comes across as reserved but polite and stealthily funny. At one point, he is talking about the “gluttony” of fame, then, in the same tone of voice, says, “also the actual gluttony, I feel like I got really fat at one point, too.” He remembered noticing himself on-screen in the film, looking svelte, and thinking, “My cheekbones are like popping! I gotta put the fork down.”
Unusually, especially for a person on his level of stardom, he seems curious about other people and full of thoughtful questions. But his conversation style can feel circuitous, so just as he is starting to get at something solid, he veers into a kind of esoteric, lofty diffuseness.
When talking about “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which he said is his most personal project, he also said it’s not really his story. It is based on his life, and he’s playing a character named after himself who goes through an experience modeled on one he had, but it’s also fictional, and a product of the entire team that made it.
Instead, he called it “a love letter to his fans.” He said they know retiring his alter-ego is something he has been working towards for a while, and specifically, “taking a step in life where I might lose people because they just might not care.”
For someone who mines his own psyche, then pays the price for how debilitating he sometimes finds other people’s perceptions of him, the singer appears to shrug at how those perceptions have landed, especially around sexism. A standard critique of “The Idol” was that it glorified the kind of grotesque sexual and emotional abuse it claimed to rebuke.
When asked if these criticisms bother him, he said, “No, it’s completely my fault,” adding, “Look, being judged, shame, is not fun. But if you open yourself up, you have to expect it.”
In this new film, Ms. Ortega’s character is an extremely powerful woman in the life of the Weeknd. Asked if it felt important to bring a feminine power into this highly personal story, he trailed off as he answered. “It felt important. Maybe I’m not really good at explaining it,” he said. “It’s just — it’s a good question. I just wish I had a prepared answer.”
The post Abel Tesfaye Bids Farewell to The Weeknd appeared first on New York Times.
