Shrill cries rippled through the stadium, and one by one the smartphones came out to record. Fans knew they were witnessing a strange and heartbreaking moment for the Toronto singer, and many wanted to capture the uncomfortable memory on video.
“This is killing me,” Tesfaye confessed, after stopping a rendition of I Can't Feel My Face. “I don’t want to stop the show, but I can’t give you the concert that I want to give you right now.” He then promised to reschedule the performance and walked off stage.
That stunning moment in Los Angeles last September was the first public sign that The Weeknd was struggling through something big — and that something big was The Idol.
The Weeknd's 'rebirth' with The Idol
The Idol premiered its first episode on "don't call us HBO" MAX on June 4, after critics gave it a rocky reception at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The controversial new series from Euphoria creator Sam Levinson stars Lily-Rose Depp as a rising pop star and Tesfaye as the sleazy cult leader who pulls her into his orbit, in a show full of graphic sex scenes and dreamy, eye-melting nightlife visuals.
The whole thing has been a painful process of reinvention for Tesfaye, who seemingly lost himself — or at least his voice — while playing his character Tedros, and came out the other side with a plan to lose his stage name, too.
"I had to take off The Weeknd outfit, put on Tedros' wig, shoot with Jocelyn (Depp), then go back to being The Weeknd," Tesfaye told W Magazine in a recent feature interview, one of several that he's done with glossy mags in recent months.
"It was tough to go from one head to the other," he said, adding that it soon culminated in him losing his voice at that concert in L.A. "That's never happened before. My theory is that I forgot how to sing because I was playing Tedros, a character who doesn't know how to sing. I may be looking too deeply into this, but it was terrifying."
Later in that interview he confessed that he's "getting ready to close The Weeknd chapter," and that he plans to shed his stage name and be "reborn" as something else.
He may need to shed Tedros first.
"Tedros is that superego that we as men want to stay away from as much as possible," he told Vanity Fair in a separate interview. "That's inside of us and we just gotta kill that."
What the Weeknd was like on set
Tesfaye only just started acting with 2019's Uncut Gems, but he does seem to have embraced the method acting approach with The Idol, based on comments he and his co-stars have made in recent months.
Daniel Day Lewis, Heath Ledger, Jared Leto and Jeremy Strong have all inspired plenty of headlines based on their method acting approach in the past. Those stories usually involve the actor pretending to be their character even when the cameras are off, although that's not quite what method acting is really about.
The whole method acting approach was created by acting coach Lee Strasberg, although it tends to get some bad press. The "method" basically encourages people to pour their own experiences and trauma into building characters, so that they can try to genuinely feel what that character would feel instead of faking it to convey it.
In other words, it's not just about pretending you're Tedros or the Joker 24/7, although there is an element of living inside that character's head.
It's unclear if Tesfaye actually trained in the "method" acting approach, or if he just tried to immerse himself in it and got tripped up in the process.
"I don't think anybody went full method. Nobody lost their minds," Depp recently told Entertainment Weekly, before pausing to correct herself. “Well, sometimes Abel would get — I don’t want to reveal too much about where Abel’s character goes, but when he would be in full Tedros mode sometimes, I would steer clear of him. I’d be like, ‘He’s in his zone right now.’”
What does that zone look like? Tesfaye described Tedros as "Dracula" during a press conference at Cannes, where he also explained that his own experiences informed a lot of what audiences see in The Idol.
"I initially wanted to make a dark, twisted fairy tale with the music industry and everything I know about it, and heighten it and take inspiration from films that both me and Sam love," he said.
Weeknd at Tedros'
The story of The Idol's production is dark and twisted in its own right, based on several people who spoke to Rolling Stone.
The outlet published a blistering expose about on-set issues with The Idol back in March, including allegations that Tesfaye had the show rewritten because he thought it was too focused on a female perspective. There were also allegations that the show was being turned into a misogynistic "rape fantasy" — something that Tesfaye and Levinson have denied.
"I thought the article was ridiculous," The Weeknd said of those allegations, per Vanity Fair.
Still, we do know that something wasn't right with the first version of The Idol.
Tesfaye told Vanity Fair that they'd nearly finished shooting the show when they decided to basically scrap everything and do it over again on a shoestring budget. They'd blown through most of their money, so Tesfaye offered up his own mansion in Beverly Hills as a set, and they shot some stadium crowd scenes guerrilla-style at his own shows.
"We basically moved into Abel's house, which was our shooting location," Levinson told the New York Times. "We knew that we were going to shoot the entire show in this one place, so we turned it into a live set."
The Weeknd says he had to move out because of all the commotion at home.
"I had to stay in character," he told W Magazine, while describing the decision to turn his home into a set. "I took my dog and we lived in another house. My home belonged to the show; it was a hub of activity. We were trying to blur the line between fiction and reality. We had cameras going all the time."
'See your dreams through to the end'
The Weeknd ultimately got his house and his voice back after The Idol, although we're still waiting to see what the future looks like, as change seems to be swirling around him.
Will he ultimately drop The Weeknd as a stage name? And will he keep acting and producing after The Idol, despite what the critics have said?
He hasn't said for sure what will come next, but he had plenty of positive words to share about his Idol experience on June 4, the day it premiered.
"Making this show has been as challenging and rewarding as anything else I've ever done," he wrote in an Instagram post thanking his fans. "Out of all the things I've learned, the one thing that keeps sticking with me is that there is always a way to see your dreams through to the end."
What does that end look like?
We'll have to wait a few more weeks to find out.
The Idol stars The Weeknd, Lily-Rose Depp, Jennie Kim of Blackpink, Dan Levy, Rachel Sennott and Hank Azaria. You can catch new episodes on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on Crave in Canada and MAX in the United States.
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