FOR HIS FOLLOW-UP TO ACCLAIMED DRAMA WAVES DIRECTOR TREY EDWARD SHULTS THAMS UP WITH THE WEEKND'S A BEL TESFAYE FOR EXISTENTIAL THRILLER HURRY UP TOMORROW READY TO TAKE A TRIP

WORDS ALHORNER

Clockwise from main: Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd — playing a version of himself — contemplates life, the universe and everything;

Annie (Jenna Ortega) likes to leave her mark;

The lights weren’t just blinding —they burned that night at LA’s SoFi Stadium too, a fierce heat overcoming Abel Tesfaye as he broke down in front of 80,000 fans. It was the final show of his 2022 North American tour, and the Canadian pop sensation known as The Weeknd was in a hot sweat, struggling to get through the opening track of his set. “I’d gone on stage before with the flu, a high fever, with injuries, after deaths in the family and break-ups, and I was always able to rely on my voice,” he tells Empire. Not on this occasion. Less than a minute in, stood atop a John Carpenter-esque replica of a burnt-out skyscraper, his voice began to falter. Realising he couldn’t fight through the problem, he departed the stage, reappearing minutes later to give an emotional apology. “I can’t give you what I want to give you,” he told fans —a line that, in some parallel universe, might have been the chorus to one of his heartacheadorned anthems.

Social-media footage of the incident shows fans applauding compassionately. In that moment of panic and paranoia, though, all Tesfaye could hear reverberating around the arena was anger and rage. The next day, he visited medical professionals to see just how bad the damage to his vocal cords was. To his surprise, he was told that nothing was wrong. “There was a little bit of inflammation, but that was it,” he recalls; the problem was psychological. “I think it was a test. What happens if this thing that you’re relying on too much is taken away from you?” Or to put the question another way: who is Abel Tesfaye without his Weeknd alter-ego?

“I think that ended up being the question I had to answer,” confides the 35-year-old, who, for over a decade, had been breaking records under that moniker. The most listened-to artist on Spotify, with 120 million monthly listeners. The best-performing song in Billboard Chart history (2020’s ‘Blinding Lights’, which charted for 90 consecutive weeks). Five albums, three mixtapes, seven world tours and one then-impending TV show he co-created and starred in, in the shape of HBO’s The Idol —it had all brought Tesfaye success (with the exception of The Idol —a misfire that was cancelled after one season). But it’d also led him to the brink of some sort of collapse, with some unknown force — “whether it was God or my subconscious” —trying to stage an intervention. “I think that I needed that experience, on the biggest stage of my career, because that way I couldn’t ignore it.”