Forget The Idol’s Questionable Plot, The Weeknd Is The Worst Part

Even before the Cannes screening, the HBO series had achieved scandalous status.

The new show from the creators of Euphoria was almost ready when the main star – Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd – told the producers that he did not like the excessive "feminization" of the plot, which was embodied by the original director of the series, Amy Seimetz.

Seimetz was fired from the project, and Euphoria director Sam Levinson rewrote and reshot the script with Tesfaye.

Then there were rumors not only of chaos on the set, but also that the satire of the music business was slowly but surely turning into soft porn, subordinated to the rise of Abel and his character, Tedros, in which there was nothing but vulgar and tasteless sex scenes.

However, it is not Abel's reworked plot that is the show's weakest point, but his acting – every time Tedros appears on screen, many viewers die a little inside. The singer himself is apparently confident in his acting skills, as he admitted in one of the interviews that he got so into the character that he could not sing after filming (again, cringe):

“I had to take off the Weeknd outfit, put on Tedros’s wig, shoot with Jocelyn, then go back to being The Weeknd. […] Then, after the concert, I lost my voice. […] My theory is that I forgot how to sing because I was playing Tedros, a character who doesn’t know how to sing.”

As for Lily-Rose Depp, who claimed to be inspired by Basic Instinct, she plays a sex toy, faceless and completely uninteresting, whose presence on the screen is only necessary for sexual manipulation with The Weeknd.

The singer himself even seems to be some kind of organic in the role of a pimp-producer, but this is organic of a stinking kind – full of repulsive narcissism.

The same can be said for the series itself: the chaos on the set is reflected in the plot, which seems not to know what it wants to tell the viewer.

Sometimes you even want to close your ears: dirty talk in erotic scenes resembles staged movies for adults and causes nothing but inner discomfort.

This is clearly not what one would expect from HBO, the creator of breakthrough series like Euphoria, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, and so on.

Source: W Magazine