I’m definitely trying to shed that skin and be reborn.” I’ll still make music, maybe as Abel, maybe as The Weeknd. “It’s getting to a place and a time where I’m getting ready to close the Weeknd chapter. “I’m going through a cathartic path right now,” he said. Tesfaye’s identity crisis was about more than juggling two characters in one night. But there was something very complicated going on with my mind at that moment.” As The Weeknd, I’ve never skipped a concert. I may be looking too deeply into this, but it was terrifying. My theory is that I forgot how to sing because I was playing Tedros, a character who doesn’t know how to sing. Then, after the concert, I lost my voice. “It was tough to go from one head to another.

“I had to take off the Weeknd outfit, put on Tedros’s wig, shoot with Jocelyn, then go back to being The Weeknd,” he told me later. His two characters do not look alike: The Weeknd wears sleek black suits, while Tedros has a rattail and usually sports shiny, ’70s-style half-unbuttoned shirts with aviator sunglasses. Tesfaye, meanwhile, was experiencing a kind of breakdown. Despite her nerves, Depp was intoxicated by the power of being in front of a stadium full of adoring people. “ the love of my life-the man who pulled me through the darkest hours and into the light,” she told the fans, as Tesfaye came out to a huge roar. I felt like I was going to my wedding-I was so dolled up and in white!” Depp finally worked up the courage to introduce Tedros. “I was praying to all my guardian angels. “I was a nervous wreck,” Depp said when I spoke to her later. Depp has large eyes and the exquisite bone structure of a model, but as Jocelyn she had applied heavy eye makeup and exaggerated lip liner, which gave her face a masklike quality. She was wearing a diaphanous white dress, with her blonde hair in a loose updo. For the faithful fans, he was The Weeknd, a character he created at the start of his career for the scene in The Idol they were filming as he performed live, he needed to be Tedros, the ambitious Svengali whom Jocelyn would be presenting to the crowd.Īs the trailer for The Idol was projected onto the huge SoFi screens, Depp rehearsed her lines with Levinson. For tonight’s performance, Tesfaye, one of the biggest musicians in the world, was going back and forth between personas. Depp, who plays Jocelyn, the so-famous-she-needs-only-one-name music star in The Idol, was with Sam Levinson, the show’s cocreator and the award-winning writer and director of Euphoria. The arena was packed with about 70,000 people who were there to see Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd. Last September, on the final night of filming The Idol, an HBO show about a pop icon and her complicated relationship with a darkly charismatic club owner, Lily-Rose Depp was riding in a golf cart through SoFi Stadium, in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood.

The rose that grew