Walking out to perform in front of 80,000 people and finding that your voice has gone: it’s the type of stress dream you have the night before a big work presentation. But for Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, it happened for real at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2022. “I ran backstage to find my vocal coach: I can’t sing, it’s not coming out,” he says. “And what I found out later on is that I was having a panic attack. It wasn’t a physical injury. It was more up here” – he gestures to his head – “than it was here” – his throat.
The concert, which had to be called off and rescheduled, was the final night of a US stadium tour happening while Tesfaye was also wrapping up his painfully gestated – and eventually widely lampooned –TV series The Idol, which he starred in, co-wrote and co-produced. As production overran, he fitted in shoots around his tour; his own home was the main filming location. He began experiencing sleep paralysis.
The Idol’s closing scenes were shot at SoFi Stadium the night before Tesfaye lost his voice, with him in character as manipulative mogul Tedros. He then did an entire Weeknd concert, then went back to being Tedros for four more hours of filming on the same night. The overwork finally caught up with him. “Any time something happened in my life, I could always rely on going on stage and escaping whatever’s going on,” he says. “This was the first time I couldn’t just escape. My body was like: you can’t sing it away. You have to figure it out.”
The loss of his voice and the aftermath inspired him to co-write a psychological thriller out this week, Hurry Up Tomorrow, directed by Trey Edward Shults (a darling of the trendy A24 production stable). Heartbroken after a breakup that seems to be his fault, and pressured into performing by his manager (Barry Keoghan), Tesfaye, playing himself, goes off the rails and his voice burns out. He then meets a troubled fan, Anima, played by Jenna Ortega. Soon we’re witnessing a Carl Jung-inspired battle between Tesfaye’s ego and his unconscious, full of jump scares and petrol-doused fires. Like most films about musicians, it will appeal primarily to fans – but there are some startling images, and while Tesfaye’s acting has a couple of soap-y moments, he is generally very good as he thrashes through his neuroses.
After a 15-year career that has made him one of the world’s biggest pop stars, with the most-streamed song of all time in Blinding Lights, the film could be the end of the entire Weeknd project. “I feel grateful that I get to film my persona on 35mm, and light it on fire,” he says, sitting in a suite at the Four Seasons in New York. “I’m sure every artist would love to do that. Because it gets to a point where you don’t want to be identified for something you started at 19 years old – and then the music industry capitalises off it, off misery or whatever.The Weekndfelt like a 15-year film.” And with Hurry Up Tomorrow, “I got to say: cut! And that’s a wrap.”
Now 35, Tesfaye was born to Ethiopian parents in Toronto and raised by his single mother and grandmother. He dropped out of high school and focused on making music. At his first gigs in the early 2010s, he says he was protected from exposure by it being “the early internet age”, with fans “filming on old BlackBerry cameras”. But then he saw high-definition footage of his 2012 set at Coachella, his first visit to the US. “I said: this isn’t greatness. This is something I’ve failed at. I told my agent to book me 100 shows that year, so I can work that muscle.”
Over downbeat R&B production, an initial trilogy of mixtapes set out the lyrical themes that would come to dominate the Weeknd project: narcotics, trauma and sex, much of the latter fraught with infidelity and control issues. If you only listened to those early songs – and a fair number of his later ones too – you might think Tesfaye was rather like The Idol’s Tedros, a sex-obsessed hedonist drawn to ethically dubious BDSM dynamics and mountains of cocaine. But Tesfaye is a warm host in a chic black tracksuit, who invites me up to his suite rather than our meeting room. His conversation style is gentle, peppered with charming bursts of sudden amusement. He has donated millions of dollars through his philanthropic foundation to causes in Palestine, Ethiopia and more. It’s Mother’s Day in the US, and you can well imagine someone has received a large bouquet that morning: “My mother is so pure, and everything good from me comes from her,” he says. “She’s light, just light.”
There is a little chill, though, when I suggest that sex and relationships were presented as quite negative and transactional in that early songwriting. Tesfaye frowns; evidently he won’t go down this avenue. But he allows the warm glow to return, and concedes that at the time, “the point was to provoke in any way. To break through and provoke emotion, extreme has always been the way to go. To me it was more like being punk; at that time, it was me, it was Tyler [the Creator], it was rock’n’roll.”
The size of the gap between the soulful Tesfaye and the nihilistic Weeknd is a compelling part of the project, but Tesfaye doesn’t want to analyse this either, saying it’s the same “for every artist, not just me”. The drugs and drink in the songs were real, though. “Drugs were really good at heightening how good a song sounds when you’re making it. And then you hear it the next morning and it’s like …” He makes an awkward-realisation face. “You’ve got to be high to experience this!” For a time, he relied on alcohol to perform, “to fight nerves, to get on that stage. I never had singing lessons, never had a mentor. There was no way I was going to be great without practice. You’ve got to just go out there and fail, and failing isn’t fun. The drinking helped me deal with the oncoming failure.”
The mixtapes thrilled the underground but his ambition pushed him into the mainstream in 2015 with second albumBeauty Behind the Madness– its disco-funk and power ballads would have rivalled Get Lucky and Uptown Funk in thefamily-friendly stakes were it not for all the cocaine references. Can’t Feel My Face and The Hills both went to No 1 in the US, and Earned It, from Fifty Shades of Grey, got an Oscar nomination. “I was like: it doesn’t get bigger than this,” he says. “And naturally, then I’m like: I’ve got to beat this. You don’t want to beknownfor a song. That’s the advice I give any young artist: if you get a big song, figure out what the next move is, because you don’t want that song to identify who you are.” He cancelled a tour and went straight into making his next album, Starboy; featuring rare Daft Punk guest spots, it was even more successful. “Starboy, there was no real story. It was just: how do I get bigger than I did last year?”
The subsequent EP, My Dear Melancholy, “felt more personal again. I could focus on the heartbreak side, the vulnerable side.” He’d had two relationships with A-list women by this point, namely Bella Hadid and Selena Gomez, and I ask if there was a particular heartbreak that precipitated it. “No.” He laughs at his total stonewalling. “I’m not getting into that! But Call Out My Name became one of the biggest songs I’d ever done – I was so thankful to do stuff that’s personal and still succeeding. And then when I did After Hours” – his most successful album – “I was able to take everything I’d learned and make my magnum opus. The hit qualities of my music, the vulnerable qualities, the storytelling qualities.”
This is rather grandly expressed, but it’s justified. Released in March 2020 just as the Covid pandemic became a global crisis, After Hours’ blockbuster 80s-influenced pop, and Tesfaye’s doomed-romance storytelling, made it a perfect escapist pleasure and it went multi-platinum worldwide. He headlined the 2021 Super Bowl; lead single Blinding Lights is close to becoming the first song to be streamed 5bn times on Spotify. A blackly comic scene in Hurry Up Tomorrow features Ortega’s character, Anima, strapping Tesfaye to a bed and taunting him as the song plays on hotel room speakers. “I’m going to die listening to this fucking song that I couldn’t escape,” he explains to me. “It’s almost like: this is my punishment.” Here was the potentially career-defining hit he’d always tried to run from – did it feel like a millstone round his neck? “At one point. I love it now, but at one point I was like: holy shit, this thing got bigger than anything.”
Later in the same scene, Anima plays Gasoline, a song from After Hours’ follow-upDawn FM– in my opinion, Tesfaye’s masterpiece, but nothing like as commercially successful. Anima taunts Tesfaye again, saying: “Don’t want to call it a failure, but what happened?”
When I mention this, Tesfaye lets out a breezily resigned “ehhh” noise. “If anything isn’t bigger than the last thing you’ve done, it’s always going to be a failure to the masses,” he says. At that point, in 2022, his feeling was: “I’m going on a stadium tour, I don’t need to prove that I can do anything again.”
That was, until film-making came along. After a cameo in indie psychodramaUncut Gems, Tesfaye took a big step up in HBO series The Idol as the lead opposite Lily-Rose Depp’s pop star character Jocelyn. Tesfaye’s Tedros is a nightclub owner who has oppressively nurtured a cult of wannabe singers, and he targets Jocelyn as the ultimate prize. The result is a well-acted, amusing and unconvincingly plotted blend of music industry satire and erotic thriller.
The Idol was plagued by a massive switch in creative direction, with co-writer Sam Levinson (of Euphoria fame) taking over directing after the series was nearly wrapped, resulting in reshoots. A Rolling Stone exposé of what one source called a “shitshow” turned the buzz toxic. Critics ripped it apart, which, Tesfaye says, “makes a lot of sense”.
The issues started long before that director switch, with the original intention being for a film: “Pandemic happened, theatres are not a thing any more at the time, television is the new god.” Then it was meant to be a short miniseries, but it ballooned to a five-parter. “It could have been great if it had a beginning, middle and end. It just ended on middle.” He laughs.
“The best films have as much of a singular voice as possible, and everybody working on it cares about it just as much as the director and the actors.” And it didn’t feel that way on The Idol? “No. People cared about it, for sure. But I think it got to a point where everyone was trying to get to the finish line. You can’t force something, you’ve just got to let it be whatever it is, even if it’s half-baked.” Though he was in the writers’ room and producing, he says he didn’t want to exert too much influence, because “then I become ‘difficult’, and the worst thing you can be called in Hollywood is difficult. ‘Difficult’ spreads!” Especially when you’re starting out as an actor. “Exactly. You’ve got to pay your dues. But boy, did I pay my dues.”
He suddenly asks me if I’m spiritual. I say I think the world is too mysterious to say anything definitive, but it feels like there’s something there. “I think our instincts are that – it’s God speaking to us: ‘This isn’t right.’ When you go against your instincts, it can be blasphemous. Seriously! And you pay for it. With Idol, our instincts were ‘This isn’t right,’ but wewantedit to work.” It felt off all the way through making it? “Yeah. Too many cooks in the kitchen.” He’s still proud of “the leap of faith, and of everyone involved. Lily I think is going to be such a legend – fearless.”
For a time, he “worried that this is what film-making is: hell”. But on Hurry Up Tomorrow, the director, Shults, “brought the joy back into it”. He also provided catharsis. We discuss a scene on a private jet where Tesfaye’s seams are coming apart after his relationship breakup. “That symbolised abandonment,” Tesfaye says. “We all deal with that, whether it’s a father that left us, girlfriend, whatever it is.”
Tesfaye’s father left early on in his life, though in the recent song I Can’t Wait to Get There he wonders if they’ll reconnect one day. Were those the feelings of abandonment he was tapping into? “Nope.” An awkward laugh and another stonewall. “Forgiveness is key,” he allows. “Before we shot the film, I went through whatever healing I had to go through. And then I needed to shed that skin, and I wanted to do it in a way that felt more visual. If it wasn’t for [Shults], I would have kept it in the vault – I’ve kept a lot of albums in the vault. But it felt right to tell it.
“Men have this forcefield – it’s like we want to come off as invincible, and vulnerability is something you run away from. I was able to be vulnerable in my music, but I was able tohidebehind music. For me to trust someone like Trey to allow myself to be vulnerable, that was new for me. It felt like a therapy session for all of us. I was able to face my child self. We go through so much that we don’t even remember as children, we just suppress everything. If you don’t deal with it, it comes out.”
Tesfaye releasedan album also called Hurry Up Tomorrowearlier this year. Some songs are “callbacks” to earlier Weeknd material, but in others he seems more relaxed in his skin – perhaps a problem for a project based around darkness. “Traumas in my life, I’ve been hesitant to heal ’em / Take another hit, or my music, they won’t feel it”, he sings on Enjoy the Show.
“I was being tongue-in-cheek about it:this is what you guys love me for,” he says. “But it can’t just be debauchery. You don’t want to stay at the party too long – the next thing you know you’re 40 years old and you’re … I don’t want to do that. We all want to age gracefully.” As the Weeknd, he says, “I have said everything I have to say; whatever mission I was on as an 18-year-old, I’ve done it tenfold, and at this point it becomes gluttony, it becomes greed, it’s a sin. Literally!”
He’s been hinting at winding up the Weeknd in recent years: is this really the end? “Yeeea … well, look. I have a tour, so I don’t want to confuse anybody.” As for retiring the Weeknd moniker, “I haven’t thought that out. It’s not this calculated vision.”
I ask if the Weeknd is creatively exhausted as a project, but he flips it: “Creatively fulfilled. As an artist, you have duties, and you also have dreams. The key to my longevity is to continue dreaming. There is definitely something that isn’t fulfilled for me, and the only way you can go there is if you close a chapter somewhere else. I want to tap into a different part of my life: my heritage. I’ve never been to Ethiopia – I can’t imagine what going back to Africa is going to do for me, spiritually, emotionally, creatively. You need to reconnect with everything about yourself.” I gently ask again: is reconnecting with his father part of that exploration? “I hope so.”
He says that although his mother is a wonderful parent, in childhood “having a father figure is important. I was able to find that in friendships; I have a stepfather who came into my life later who is just as bright as my mother is – he is pure light, and I learned a lot from him, too. But they say the learning age of three to seven, that stuff stays with you for ever.” He adds that the absence is “so hard to articulate, in an interview especially. I think in the song Hurry Up Tomorrow I was able to eloquently say it.”
It’s the final song on the album, delivered as a confession to God: “I’ve been trying to fill that void that my father left / So no one else abandons me – I’m sorry,” Tesfaye sings, before hoping that he makes it to heaven. It ends with the same eerie ambient tone that opens his first mixtape, House of Balloons, a gesture of circularity and finality.
The “void” lyric reminds me of something he said earlier in our conversation, when he was reflecting on the relentless work that brought on his panic attack and lost voice. Success, he says, became “something to fill a void:my purpose is to just succeed. And when you’ve done that, you need to look around and see what really matters. The simple things: time with people you love. And sleep – we take it for granted. I didn’t realise how necessary sleep was in my life.” There’s a sighing, romantic tone to his voice, so different to the jaded Weeknd. “Sleep is such a sweet thing, isn’t it?”
Hurry Up Tomorrow is in cinemas now. The Weeknd playsFord Field, Detroit, on 24 and 25 May, thentours North America