Singer Abel Tesfaye bids farewell to The Weeknd with new film Hurry Up Tomorrow

LOS ANGELES – There is a moment in Hurry Up Tomorrow – the new psychological thriller co-written, produced by and starring R&B singer The Weeknd, whose given name is Abel Tesfaye – in which Anima, a mysterious character played by Jenna Ortega, whacks him over the head with a bottle of champagne, knocking him out cold.

“That’s my girlfriend’s favourite scene,” Tesfaye said.

Opening in Singapore cinemas on May 29, the film is a cinematic roman a clef. It tells the story of a superstar called The Weeknd – known for his melancholic music and reclusive personality – who is on a huge stadium tour, pumping himself up with drugs, booze and other assorted trappings of fame. 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 Canadian – known for his moody music, obsessive privacy, and openness about past drug and alcohol abuse – lost his voice in real life while performing at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. He has said 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 – dropped in January. Tesfaye said it will be his last release as The Weeknd.

The singer, now 35, is not planning to quit making music. He is 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.’”

The film Hurry Up Tomorrow, said American director Trey Edward Shults (Waves, 2019; It Comes At Night, 2017), is meant to have “the soul and emotion of an opera”. But the meta-implications vis-a-vis The Weeknd’s larger story are unavoidable.

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 artistes of all time, he steered clear of most press and kept public appearances short. (The Weeknd has sold an estimated 75 million records worldwide and was one of Spotify’s most streamed artistes globally in 2024, and his 2019 single Blinding Lights led Billboard’s Top Hot 100 Songs of the 21st Century.)

In the summer of 2023, his reputation took a hit with the release of The Idol, an HBO series about a pop singer (Lily-Rose Depp) who gets involved with an abusive, sleazy schemer played by Tesfaye. The production was plagued with behind-the-scenes drama and was cancelled after one season.

Although The Idol, like so many of The Weeknd’s music videos and lyrics, portrays a lurid take on fame, glamour, drugs and sex, it was “meant to be satire”, he said. But the end result was a sense that art was imitating life.

Hurry Up Tomorrow, which Shults and Tesfaye began working on before The Idol premiered, has offered an opportunity to reset.

“Failure is the best school,” he said. “This film is emotionally cathartic. It brought the love and joy back into what I always loved about film.”

To hear him tell it, he has been failing from the beginning.

Tesfaye grew up in Scarborough, Ontario, a city on the outskirts of Toronto. He was a restless student and left home when he was 17, persuading 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, Tesfaye worked retail jobs in the city 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 told only 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 per cent 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.

The first time Tesfaye boarded a plane, he said, it was to fly to California for music festival Coachella, which was his first high-profile US 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 was 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. He released five studio albums in less than 10 years, achieving endurance and breadth of influence on the charts.

By 2021, he began work on the ultimate dream: The Idol and his first stadium tour, set to start after the bulk of the show was finished shooting.

It did not work out that way.

Deadline reported that The Idol’s original director Amy Seimetz left the production amid reports that Tesfaye felt her vision showcased too much of a “female perspective”.

The Idol’s press coverage suggested Tesfaye had more in common with the character he played than he would want you to believe.

Delays caused the show’s shooting schedule to back up against his tour. Soon, Tesfaye was playing arenas and filming a TV series at the same time.

On Sept 2, 2022, The Weeknd performed the first of two shows at SoFi Stadium, the final dates on the tour.

At the end of The Idol, Tesfaye said, “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 added.

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 “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.

When talking about Hurry Up Tomorrow, which he said is his most personal project, he also said it is not really his story. It is based on his life, and he is playing a character named after himself who goes through an experience modelled on one he had. But it is 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. NYTIMES