Lily-Rose Depp Says She’d “Steer Clear” Of The Weeknd While On “The Idol” Set
Yesterday, the first episode of HBO’s highly anticipated dreaded show The Idol starring Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, and nepo baby, Lily-Rose Depp, finally dropped and surprise surprise! It’s just as depraved and boring as we thought it’d be. But, in an entire hour dedicated solely to putting a camera up to Lily-Rose ‘s nether regions, somehow the creepiest part of the show is Abel’s portrayal of his character Tedros, a sleazy nightclub owner that talks like he’s thinking of ways to cut women into pieces and eat them. And in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lily-Rose said she’d “steer clear” of The Weeknd on set when he was in character.
The Weeknd made his acting debut in 2019’s crime thriller Uncut Gems in a cameo role, so playing The Idol’s Tedros is his first time playing a character. And it looks like when figuring out how he was going to prepare for the part, he decided to go with the Jeremy Strong method. Because according to Lily-Rose, he’d be in “full Tedros mode” even while cameras weren’t rolling.
The 24-year-old actress discussed what it was like filming with the Grammy winner on the upcoming HBO show in an interview with EW published on Friday.
“I don’t think anybody went full method — nobody lost their minds,” Depp told the outlet. “Well, sometimes when 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.'”
“In his zone right now” is just a cleaned-up way of saying, “he’s acting like a rapey serial killer right now and unless a camera’s rolling I don’t wanna be around that shit.”
Despite that, Lily-Rose gave Abel his flowers and praised the way he was able to transform into Tedros during an inside look that was attached to the very end of episode one, remarking, “he was able to melt into this role in a way that is really difficult for anybody to do.”
In the months leading up to The Idol’s release, both The Weeknd and Lily-Rose have had to leap to the show’s co-creator Sam Levinson’s defense after Rolling Stone’s exposé called the scripts “torture porn” and claimed there was a lot of messiness happening behind-the-scenes. The Weeknd and Lily-Rose have more defending to do because the show’s first episode is being dragged through the mud by viewers.
thank for this! now I don’t have to watch it!
— Maggie Suzanne (@mwrightnyc) June 5, 2023
The Idol is simultaneously awful self-parody, a pretentious art project, and grotesquely exploitative of its subject matter. Sam Levinson's dialogue is about as natural as a chicken nugget. The Weekend's performance is awful. It feels like a show made by CIS men cause it is. pic.twitter.com/7gEid4lxLB
— Lord Edge (@cgd0911) June 5, 2023
I wanted badly to enjoy #THEIDOL but this was a disaster,my takeaways are
A. Lily Rose Depp is bad asf
B. Sam Levinson can’t write & The Weeknd can’t act
C. This shit was forcibly sexual in a weird way.. no way a major plot line was ab a photo of her having nut on her face😭— Brandon Martinez (@Brandoncmartine) June 5, 2023
Luckily for Sam Levinson, there are enough people hate watching the show that it’ll trick “Max” into green-lighting another season.
Pic: INSTARImages