The Weeknd Delivered One of 2023’s Best Performances in ‘The Idol’

It’s funny, the scenes that get stuck in your head. The bit from The Sopranos I think of most often has nothing to do with Tony: It’s a devastated Johnny Sack confronting his wife Ginny about her eating disorder, reassuring her he loves and desires her just as she is. People tend to focus on The Americans’ musical sequences, its sex scenes, that climactic moment at the train station in the finale, but for me the whole show is encapsulated in the look on poor deluded FBI employee Martha’s face when she sees, with her own eyes, who the man she loves really is. From Boardwalk Empire, easily the most overlooked and underrated drama of its era, Gillian Darmody’s desperate “There’s nothing wrong, baby. There’s nothing wrong with any of it!” in the flashback revealing the origin of her son Jimmy’s dysfunction is lodged in my brain forever. There’s something about what actors Vincent Curatola, Alison Wright, and Gretchen Mol do in those moments in their characters’ lives that make them harder to forget than many moments in my own.

Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye is the biggest pop star in the world. On Spotify, he has had more monthly listens than any other artist every month since December 2022; in March 2023, he set the record for most monthly listens by any artist ever. Other than a desire to branch out into a new field he had no particular reason to co-create and star in The Idol, unless of course you’re willing to extend him credit for having some ideas about the manufactured personae of cool people that he wanted to explore.

I’m not surprised few people seem willing to extend him that credit. Artists, especially musicians, are condescended to as idiot savants by audience and critics alike more often than you’d think. But this is a man who belted “Let me seeeee that asssssssss” in his first hit song as if “that ass” held all the wonder and terror of the Ark of the Covenant; his longest-reigning number one hit is named after a horror movie, features high-pitched slasher-flick screams throughout, and centers on the line “When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me,” one of the most man, that’s depressing when you think about it lyrics in pop history. It seems safe to say that he’s viewed sex, drugs, money, and fame with a jaundiced eye throughout his career, likely before he had much of…well, I was going to say “any of it,” but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on the sex and the drugs.

At any rate, presented with a starring vehicle he himself helped build, Tesfaye proceeded to get in that vehicle, aim at the wall, and plow into it at full speed throughout the course of The Idol’s five episodes. I’m not talking about the strength of his performance, which I’ll get to, or the critical and commercial reception of the show, which is irrelevant. I’m talking about the deliberate damage he did to his image as a suave, sophisticated, ice-cold Hollywood vampire. The goofy name, the rat-tail hairdo, the rehearsed pickup lines, the corny daddy-dom sexual antics, the on-screen comparisons to parasitical showbiz-adjacent cults run by weirdly charismatic grifters like the Manson Family and NXIVM, the backstory of decidedly unglamorous pimping and abuse, loudly jacking off in the dressing room of an upscale clothing boutique, getting hammered and trying kung fu to intimidate his inamorata Jocelyn’s (Lily Rose Depp) ex-boyfriend, obnoxiously heckling Joss after she rejects him and plans her next career move without him, visibly struggling not to puke after a multi-day bender as industry bigwig Nikki (Jane Adams) tells him what a genius he is — Tedros, the character Tesfaye created with showrunner-writer-director Sam Levinson and co-creator Reza Fahim, is a stake driven through that Hollywood vampire’s heart, over and over again.

As you can tell from that litany, many parties are responsible for this act of image autophagia. I’ll single out Levinson’s writing, since writers make everything we watch possible and deserve to be paid and treated fairly by WBD and every other studio, but I could just as easily spotlight costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas for always making Tedros’s idea of glamour look slightly, and often not so slightly, ridiculous (socks in Tevas!), or Christopher Fulton and Kristen Coleman’s hair and makeup departments, who slowly turned Tedros into the world’s sweatiest man.

But turning to that final scene on stage, the deal is the same as it was with those examples from The Sopranos and The Americans and Boardwalk Empire I rattled off above: It comes down to the actor.

To set the stage, ex-convict turned club promoter and wannabe music producer Tedros Tedros has spent weeks grooming troubled pop star Jocelyn into the latest and most successful of his artistc protégés, engaging in strategic acts of ethically dubious BDSM to cement the bond. But when Joss discovers he’s also behind her rival Dyanne (Jennie Kim from BLACKPINK), his hold snaps. Armed with the artistic inspiration he admittedly helped ignite in her, she realizes she has no further use for him and rejects him for the con man he is…temporarily.

The night her big comeback tour is slated to begin, Tedros discovers she’s left him a backstage pass, under his government name rather than this “Tedros” nonsense. That spell is still broken. But it turns out that now that she can see him clearly and has reasserted her power accordingly, she actually likes having him around. (I get it: Bonds formed during vulnerable times can be resilient, she did seem to have a good time fucking him, and the show goes out of its way to establish that he has a real ear for talent despite being a slimy dork in every other respect.) To the horror of her hilarious industry handlers, who’ve nuked his reputation in the press, she brings him on stage and introduces him to the world as “the love of her life.” In the spotlight, they kiss. It’s his moment of triumph, everything he’s been diligently working for: recognition as the man behind the music. It seems life has given him, in his words, “cartay blanchay.”

Until she tells him “You’re mine, forever. Now go stand over there.” Then Tedros realizes that the monkey’s paw of his life has curled a finger. He’s got Jocelyn forever, to quote the title of the episode, but as a master rather than a servant. He’s her lover, yes, but he’s no longer her guru. He’s her employee. (Decider’s Meghan O’Keefe explained all this beautifully in an earlier piece.)

Now watch what Tesfaye does as Tedros while Jocelyn pulls away from him to reclaim the spotlight as her own. Levinson’s camera breaks the 180 degree rule to shift the closeup’s focus from Joss to Tedros; she pulls away from their eye contact with a sneer, leaving him staring at her blankly. A wider shot shows her walking confidently downstage toward the crowd as he, making a face like he just sniffed a fart, sort of staggers back into the darkness. He bobs his head just slightly as he does so, as if thinking “Huh. Okay. Well, fuck.” 

We’re watching a man process, in real time, in front of a sold-out arena full of screaming fans, that his moment of triumph is a moment of defeat, that the man he thought he could become has been vaporized out of existence, that for likely the first time in his sleazeball adult life there’s a woman on top. And the way Tesfaye plays it imprinted on me instantly. He doesn’t lose it, nor does he fake being excited by it. He stares, he winces a bit, he chokes down this blow to his macho self image, and he dutifully goes and stands over there. Not even the hit job done on him by label exec Nikki and manager Chaim (Hank Azaria) and LiveNation chief Finkelstein (Eli Roth) had him this shook; keep in mind that he showed up at the arena expecting a backstage pass even after they torched his life. Only in this moment does he realize he’s cooked, and he’s too cowed by the power of Jocelyn and her “angels” to do anything about it but follow orders.

This is Abel Tesfaye as the anti-Weeknd. (The Weekdy?) It’s a worthy capstone to a season full of quietly and so-far thanklessly extraordinary acting by Tesfaye, from his reptilian sangfroid during the BDSM scenes to his transparently empty bluster while threatening repeatedly to curbstomp a clothing store employee. And for me, it’s as killer a performance as “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” or “Blinding Lights” or his starmaking cameos on Drake’s Take Care. That look in his eyes, that grimace on his face, that complete lack of machismo in his stagger-step out of the spotlight — I’ll remember it like I remember Johnny Sack and Martha and Gillian in their own moments of trial and tribulation. Whatever my brain is reacting to when it looks as these moments and tells me “This is great acting,” I’ve learned to trust it. This is great acting.

None of this is to slight the work done by Depp (searing and vulnerable acting that I think will eventually get its due) or the comic ensemble around her (Azaria and Adams and Roth and Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Rachel Sennott earned plaudits even from skeptical critics, as best I can tell.) It’s simply to say that all the armchair Razzies handed out to the Weeknd for his acting on this show do not, and never have, meshed with what I saw on screen. Those final moments merely confirmed what I’d thought all along. The Weeknd, an artist who has spent his whole career deliberately playing with notions of glamour and masculinity, is equally adept at doing so when he doesn’t have a note to sing.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.