In a new interview with W Magazine, musician and actor Abel Tesfaye (better known by his moniker The Weeknd) hints that his pop stardom may be coming to an end.

"I'm going through a cathartic path right now," he told the magazine. "There's a time and a place where I'm ready to wrap up the Weeknd chapter. I'm still going to make music, maybe Abel, maybe The Weeknd. But I still want to kill The Weeknd. I will. Eventually. I definitely want to shed that skin, Rebirth."

He added: "The album I'm working on right now may be my last hurray as The Weeknd. It's something I have to do. As The Weeknd, I've said all I can say."

Tesfaye described his final album, Dawn FM 2022, as part of a "new trilogy" following the release of After Hours in 2020, leading some fans to speculate that The Weekend's character died with After Hours and found himself on Dawn FM Purgatory above. By the third, and perhaps final, Weeknd album, some fans were speculating that we might find out whether the pop star ended up in heaven or hell.

In addition to the surprising revelation about The Weeknd, Tesfaye also took the opportunity to tell W about The Idol, his upcoming HBO series about a young pop star (Lily-Rose Depp) and a predatory The producer of Sex-slash cult leader (Tesfaye Tangled Story) is on her way to stardom. He co-wrote the show with Euphoria czar Sam Levinson, but the buzzy production was rife with reports of reshoots, rewrites, and delays, as well as lamentations from the production staff over the abundance of disturbing sexual content.

One producer told Rolling Stone that Levinson's vision for "Idol" was "like the rape fantasies any toxic guy on the show would have — and then the woman comes back because it makes her music better." .”
Tesfaye spoke about the on-set drama in an interview with W, saying, "Film and TV are a new creative force for me. I don't release my music until I think it's great. Why would there be anything?" Different? ... I realized I needed to know that I had made the best version of what I was making. Remaking an idol was a challenge, and in fact, I sacrificed my health and family to make it work."
He added that while it's possible the series "came out, but it was so fucking horrible", he ended up doing "the absolute best" with it. "Everything is a risk: when you do your best, I would call it the happy ending."