“I don’t know if you ever finished ‘Idol,’” Mr. Tesfaye said, with a good-natured smirk, during the conversation at his home in Los Angeles.
“I don’t know if you got to the end yet, but I’ll help you out: By the end, our main character, Jocelyn is in a stadium in front of a crowd of people giving a speech. That was a real stadium. We shot right before I went onstage the first night. Lily did her speech to a confused audience. They thought that was part of the show,” he said.
Mr. Tesfaye then went out and performed as the Weeknd for two hours. After the stadium emptied out, he put on his character’s rat tail wig and went out onto the empty stage to shoot the show for “for another three or four hours.”
The next night, in the middle of his set, the singer heard a pop. Doctors confirmed that his vocal cords were strained, but he noted that the injury was mainly due to psychological stress.
“A Love Letter to My Fans”
Though Mr. Tesfaye can seem self-serious and remote, in person he comes across as reserved but polite and stealthily funny. At one point, he is talking about the “gluttony” of fame, then, in the same tone of voice, says, “also the actual gluttony, I feel like I got really fat at one point, too.” He remembered noticing himself on-screen in the film, looking svelte, and thinking, “My cheekbones are like popping! I gotta put the fork down.”
Unusually, especially for a person on his level of stardom, he seems curious about other people and full of thoughtful questions. But his conversation style can feel circuitous, so just as he is starting to get at something solid, he veers into a kind of esoteric, lofty diffuseness.
