Issue 548: Abel Tesfaye

Few people in the entertainment industry grind harder than Abel Tesfaye. As The Weeknd, he was a global pop star by the age of 25, and has earned the right to take his time between projects. But Tesfaye, a true polymath, is overflowing with ideas and has the means to make them real. So a few months before the release of The Idol — the HBO series about a pop star and the cult leader she falls in love with, which Tesfaye cocreated with Reza Fahim and Sam Levinson —he was working until dawn shooting an upcoming movie he cowrote and stars in. When Jeremy O. Harris finally connected with Tesfaye over Zoom, the 33-year-old “nice Canadian guy” had literally just woken up.