The Weeknd Insists, Really, That He's Nothing Like His Character on 'The Idol'

The music of Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. The Weeknd, has been inescapable for the last decade or so, but Tesfaye himself has remained a largely enigmatic figure. He rarely gives interviews and rarely shares anything about his personal life. We know his music, but we don’t know him, and so The Idol, which he co-wrote and co-stars in, is the first impression many of us have of him as a person. Except he’s a scuzzy gross character, who says things like “Imagine my tongue on your pu**y. My fat tongue.”

If we knew more about Tesfaye himself, it’d be easier to separate him from his character, but when you are actually responsible for the writing in a show as ick as The Idol, it’s hard not to believe that the person informs the character. Tesfaye, however, gave an interview to GQ to dispel that belief, and he’s apparently concerned enough to give the interview during the writers’ strike, which is a no-no for WGA members, of which I assume Abel Tesfaye belongs as the co-writer of The Idol.

He really doesn’t want anyone to think he’s like his character in real life.

“The only way I could play this role was if it’s something completely different from who I am,” Tesfaye told GQ. “And I can distance myself from that character. I wanted to make sure he looked nothing like me, acted nothing like me, just a totally different person.”

And that definitely “different” person is “a douchebag. You can tell he cares so much about what he looks like, and he thinks he looks good. But then you see these weird moments of him alone — he rehearses, he’s calculated. And he needs to do that, or he has nothing, he’s pathetic … He comes off like such a loser.”

Which, again, is nothing like Abel Tesfaye, who is definitely not a douchebag or a pathetic loser. And also, if watching The Idol makes you feel uncomfortable “or gross” or “embarrassed for the characters,” that’s by design, too. “We’re puppet-mastering your feelings through the show. It’s never a consistent tone, and that’s on purpose.”

It’s bad on purpose, see! It was all part of the plan.

Source: GQ