The Weeknd Insists 'Cinema' Is His True Passion Despite His Panned Performance In The Idol
The Weeknd has revealed his true life's passion... and surprisingly, it's not music. The 'Starboy' musician admitted that his rise to superstardom in the music industry was really just 'a little detour' he used to pursue his number one passion.
The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, sat alongside his 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' co-star Jenna Ortega and director Trey Edward Shults where he discussed how his decorated music career has led him to starring in his upcoming musical film, 'Hurry up Tomorrow.' The movie — based on his sixth and final studio album under The Weeknd stage name — serves as a soundtrack to the highly anticipated film.
Described as a 'suspense thriller,' the film follows an international pop star 'plagued by insomnia' and 'pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence. They story is loosely inspired by Tesfaye's own career.
He confessed how, 'Cinema has always, for me, it's always kind of been my number one passion. I happen to sing and make music and it kind of felt like a little detour, a little cheat code to kind of get into this. I always wanted to make movies and I always wanted to make music with movies.' He added: 'During that journey, you always kind of hear and see the DNA of cinema in my albums and my music videos, and my performances on my stage. It's always just been a part of me.'
The star's breakout acting role came in 2023 on HBO's 'The Idol,' which received mixed reviews and criticism for both the plot and his acting chops. That said, the pop mega star admitted that 'The Idol' didn't quite feel like it was his, whereas 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' brought the joy back into filmmaking. 'I'm like, 'Yeah! I do want to do this…this is great,' ' the star said with a relieved laugh.
Tesfaye's decision to retire his stage name came during a time his voice began to fail him, describing the film as a 'guiding light' to push him forward to the next step in his career. 'It felt like I had nothing else to say,' the 35-year-old revealed. 'I was on stage and it's like, I've said everything I can say as this person. Now it's time for me to take that next step.'
While Tesfaye's breakout role may have left fans less than inspired, many are gearing up to see what's next for him in this 'intentionally mysterious' mind bending thriller, co-written by the music artist.
Since kicking off his career with acclaimed mixtape 'House of Balloons,' Tesfaye has reportedly taken home a total of 176 awards out of 513 nominations including Grammy, Billboard, American Music, and MTV Awards.
'Hurry Up Tomorrow' is set to release in theaters May 16.
This story originally appeared on The Root, our sister site, on Thursday, May 8.
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New Mike Tyson book goes inside cartoonish early attempts to market Iron Mike
Edited and adapted from the book 'Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson' by Mark Kriegel. Copyright © 2025 by Mark Kriegel. From Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Reprinted by permission. Going back several fights, Mike Tyson had developed alopecia, a condition that manifested itself with a bald spot on the right side of his scalp about an inch above the hairline. He attributed it to stress — not just the pressure of being heavyweight champion but also the unforgiving pace of his training schedule and the gladiator-like sparring. What's more, Tyson's courtship with Robin Givens was a turbulent one: passionate, tempestuous, full of fits and starts. He'd push; she'd pull. There was also an incident that summer at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles: Tyson tried to kiss a parking lot attendant, then smacked around the guy who came to her defense. 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But Marley only came back harder, writing on 'the summer of Tyson's discontent' and opining that Rooney and Lott had him under a kind of house arrest in Vegas. 'They even grab his mail,' said Marley's source, whom I'd bet was King. It was a grievance that Robin had already seized on. 'These people' — Jacobs, Cayton, and their underlings — 'don't understand Mike,' she told biographer Jose Torres. 'They will never know how to deal with him.' By August 1, 1987, as Tyson entered the ring for the Tucker fight, the once-nickel-sized bald spot was more like a silver dollar. Not that anyone mentioned it. HBO was determined to present the Tyson camp only in the most flattering light. First came a prefight feature on the now-embattled Rooney, or as HBO's Larry Merchant called him, '[legendary trainer Cus] D'Amato's keenest disciple.' 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'I have no doubt in my mind,' Clements told HBO viewers, 'that with the help of the heavyweight champion of this planet, that church will go up.' *** Fourteen minutes later, after the baroque trumpets (thank you, Don) heralding Tyson's arrival but still just seconds into the opening round, the young champ took a left uppercut that lifted him clean off his feet. Tucker was a 10–1 underdog, an ancillary presence going into the fight. If he seemed nondescript, then it was a judgment rendered largely by the same people (not merely fans, those in the press box as well) who failed to individuate just about every Black champion and challenger going back to Larry Holmes, as if they were all versions of the same bum. In fact, what was most typical about Tucker was the way in which he'd been divvied up, with chunks of his purse going to promoters Cedric Kushner, Jeff Levine, and Josephine Abercrombie and managers Dennis Rappaport, Alan Kornberg, and Emanuel Steward, not to mention his own father, who had auctioned off these aforementioned shares of his progeny. 8 The cover of Mark Kriegel's book, 'Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson.' Penguin Press Percentages aside, though, Tucker was a real talent, well schooled, with a fine pedigree. He'd won an assortment of national and international titles while Tyson was still at Spofford. Now, at twenty-nine, he was at his physical peak. Six five, 221 pounds, with a thirteen-inch reach advantage over Tyson, Tucker was the kind of athlete who in later years would have forsaken dim, fetid gyms for an athletic dorm in the SEC or the Big Ten. Undefeated in thirty-four fights, Tucker had never even been knocked down. So perhaps it shouldn't have been such a shocker that he lifted Tyson airborne. Still more shocking was the manner in which Tyson took it — without so much as flinching. The chin that absorbed the blow remains Tyson's most undermentioned virtue. The uppercut wasn't the last clean shot he took, either. It was easy to see why Michael Spinks — now sitting with Butch Lewis in the uppermost row, UU, of the Hilton Center, pretending to be inconspicuous — had avoided him for the easier money against Gerry Cooney. Tucker had an assured left hook he could throw moving backward and an excellent straight right hand whose proficiency waned through the bout, as he'd hurt it the week before in sparring. But Tucker knew how to tie up an opponent without looking like a cowardly lion. It was a good fight, belying the notion that Tyson's opponents were either heartless huggers or petrified victims. Eventually, though, Tyson's power, relentlessness, and dauntless chin proved too much for Tucker, who suffered his first loss by unanimous decision. *** Tyson now had all three belts, the undisputed heavyweight champion. Barely twenty-one, he was not merely king of the division but, as Cus and Jimmy had envisioned, king of all boxing. Such an occasion called for a coronation, or as King put it, 'a throneization.' Hence the baroque trumpets — a band of six, played by grown men in feathered caps, velvet pantaloons, and sequined tunics — now heard again to summon Tyson's subjects, loyal and otherwise. In addition to the trumpeters was a delegation of Beefeaters, one of whom was the otherwise no-shtick ring announcer Chuck Hull — an offense that, wrote the Daily News's Mike Katz, 'no amount of gin could blot.' Hull, a pit boss by day, had vowed never to 'prostitute his craft' like the new, attention-seeking generation of 'Let's get ready to rumble' announcers. Nevertheless, there he was reading from a script that began, 'Hear ye! Hear ye!' Tyson, to his obvious chagrin, was seated in a red velvet throne and presented with what King called an assortment of 'baubles, rubies, and fabulous doodads.' They included a chinchilla robe from Lenobel Furriers of Las Vegas and a studded necklace and scepter, courtesy of Felix the Jeweler. A crown from the same set was placed atop his head by Muhammad Ali. 8 Mike Tyson celebrates his victory over Tony Tucker at the coronation gala following his world boxing heavyweight championship fight in Las Vegas on Aug. 2, 1987. AP More astounding, and an even greater testament to King's powers of persuasion, were the 'knights' the new champion had vanquished, among them 'Sir Bonecrusher' and 'Sir Pinky,' otherwise known as Pinklon Thomas. The heads of the notoriously feudal, tribute-demanding sanctioning bodies were all there, as were a bevy of HBO executives who received statuettes, leading Eddie Murphy to wonder why in a room full of Black fighters, only the white guys got trophies. There was a children's choir from Chicago and a female gospel singer from Cleveland. The Reverend Al Green sang 'Our Precious Lord.' The Reverend Charles Williams, leader of the annual Indiana Black Expo, blessed the meal. Then the Reverend Al Sharpton — newly famous from his protest marches in Howard Beach — presented Tyson with his championship belts, while Givens, his ostensible queen, was seen beaming as the photographers snapped away. The single victory for modesty that night was notched by 'Sir Seth' Abraham of HBO, who declined the robe King had selected for him. 'Is it real sable?' he asked. 'Of course not,' said King. But consider the force of ego, the power required of King to create such an assemblage. What must it have taken to hold the assorted dignitaries hostage almost two hours after a title fight? Bad taste? Vegas was founded on bad taste. This wasn't about the entertainment or the blessings. It was about the real king. If Tyson were a Tudor and Seth Abraham the Bank of England, then Don King was a version of Cardinal Wolsey. He wasn't the jester; he was the power. And if this was Don King's tribute to Olde Las Vegas, it was also his message to her founding fathers, many of whom, just like Don, came by way of Cleveland, members of a Hebraic criminal aristocracy. 8 Mike Tyson (r.) and Robin Givens (l.) in January 1988. Getty Images It was now supposed, given the rapidity and relative ease with which Tyson seized custody of all three belts, that his reign would last beyond even the foreseeable future. His next opponent, Olympic gold medalist Tyrell Biggs, was already on the books for that fall. But while Biggs's mobility and jab were often cited as the tools necessary to beat Tyson, no one really expected that much of the erstwhile Olympian, who had already endured at least one cocaine rehab. Beyond that? George Foreman, retired for a decade, had just embarked on what seemed a circus-like comeback. Cruiserweight champion Evander Holyfield was talking about eventually moving up, though his chances as an undersized heavyweight seemed fanciful and owed mostly to the success of Michael Spinks. Spinks was seen as the only truly interesting fight for Tyson. The real question, then, was for Tyson himself. What would his long reign signify? How would he compare with his predecessors? The question had less to do with his actual self than with his persona. Jack Dempsey, who had ridden the rails as a boy, came to personify the Roaring Twenties. Joe Louis was pressed into service as a shining example of American democracy on the eve of World War II. Just the same, there was a reason that the photograph of Rocky Marciano ruining Joe Walcott's jaw had assumed a place of such reverence, along with the Christ heads and centerfolds, in Italian social clubs and barbershops across America. Finally, there was Ali, whose mythic self had evolved into several incarnations, each one bigger than the last. Garry Wills once called Ali 'catnip to the intellectuals.' And it felt like Joyce Carol Oates began in a similar vein with Tyson in Life. Her note on Tyson as 'a psychic outlaw' feels like warmed-over Mailer, while her notion of Tyson as perhaps 'the first heavyweight boxer in America to transcend issues of race' seems hopeful but naive. Still, she made explicit what had been hiding in plain sight: 'He is trained, managed and surrounded, to an unusual degree, by white men.' That these white men had given Tyson, quite intentionally, a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval led to another of Oates's keener observations, in a subsequent piece that year for the Village Voice: 'For all his reserve, his odd, even eerie combination of shyness and aggression, his is a wonderfully marketable image.' Consider that Ali in 1979 — not yet retired but a beloved global icon, managed to get an endorsement for d-CON roach spray. But Tyson at a mere twenty-one — in addition to being HBO's 'walking billboard' — already had deals with Diet Pepsi, Eastman Kodak, and the Japanese brewer Suntory, as well a groundbreaking agreement (negotiated, like the others, by Cayton) with Nintendo for Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, a video game that would sell more than two million copies in its first year. Cayton even thought to trademark Tyson's very Rocky-like nickname, Iron Mike. Perhaps, then, Tyson's true meaning had to do with his value as a commercial touchstone. But playing the pitchman — at least as his handlers had scripted the role for him — required some image scrubbing. 'To overcome the stigma attached to Mike's juvenile delinquent past,' recalled Cayton, 'we arranged for Mike to make a commercial on behalf of the New York City Police Department and an anti-drug commercial for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike also did a commercial for the Internal Revenue Service and for United Cerebral Palsy. Each commercial was designed to foster the image of Mike as civic-minded and law-abiding.' 8 Mike Tyson on the cover of Ring Magazine in November 1987. The Ring Magazine via Getty Imag And, in a very particular way, whiter. 'In the way he's been handled,' noted The Ring's Jack Obermayer, 'it's almost like he's a 'white hope' in a Black man's skin.' Of course, the selling of Tyson began with the fairy tale of 'Cus and the Kid.' He had lived, essentially, in an all-Black world until D'Amato and his minions 'saved' him, in part by segregating him. He then attended mostly white schools and learned his craft in a mostly white gym above a small-town police station. His trainers were white, as were his patrons and even his cornermen, cut man Matt Baranski, and bucket man Lott, who'd now remind Tyson, per Jacobs's instructions, to remove his blingier pieces of jewelry before being interviewed on camera. Tyson, like Floyd Patterson before him, had been taught obedience in matters of commerce but had begun to bridle at the way he was being monetized. All those 'Just Say No'-style PSAs made him feel like 'a fake f–king Uncle Tom n—a' and 'a monkey,' Tyson writes in his biography Undisputed Truth. *** Nobody transcends race, not in America. But Tyson's racial predicament — or his cultural one, depending how you parse it — was distinct, and connected or perhaps conflated with his old neighborhood. 'Jimmy and Bill were intent on stripping away all the Brownsville from me,' he writes in that same passage. 'But Brownsville was who I was … Everyone knew I was a criminal. I had come from a detention home. Now all of sudden I was a good guy?' Something in Tyson would always romanticize the Street and judge himself more harshly than his contemporaries who hadn't had the benefit of an old man to save and rehabilitate them. Whatever Tyson had accomplished, he still wondered how it would play back home. That he no longer had a Brooklyn address didn't mean he'd ever left. Or ever would. 'To be honest,' says Lennie Daniels, one of his early sparring partners and among the very few Black men he met in Catskill, 'I don't know if he ever was happy being away from it.' That summer, Lori Grinker finally prevailed on him to do a shoot back in Brownsville. They left from Lott's apartment in Midtown. Tyson wore all white but for the geometric print on his T-shirt and his gold watches — a thin Cartier on his left wrist, a Rolex on his right. Grinker's photographs of that day seem straightforward enough: Tyson at the barbershop; Tyson signing autographs for the admiring children gathered around his blue Rolls-Royce; Tyson in sunglasses, resplendent in his white ensemble, sitting on the hood of the car, set against a pocked and weedy lot, greeting old friends like supplicants. 8 Mike Tyson, sitting on his new Rolls Royce, visits friends in Brownsville in 1987. Lori Grinker/Contact Press Images More remarkable, in Grinker's recollection, was an encounter on the drive out. Halfway across the bridge — either Williamsburg or Manhattan, she doesn't recall — a woman pulled up alongside the Rolls and handed Tyson a slip of paper. It was her daughter's phone number. Nothing unusual in that — except for the question it provoked. 'People who see me in this car, what do they think?' Tyson asked Grinker. 'That I'm a drug dealer?' The streets of Tyson's childhood had only become meaner and more deadly in his absence. The introduction of crack cocaine in the mid-eighties changed the culture of crime. Crackheads re-upped more frequently than heroin junkies. On the supply side, all those stickup kids from Spofford were bosses now. Or they were dead. Crack democratized the gangster life. You didn't need a French Connection or a made man willing to sell you kilos on consignment. You didn't need some weathered Sicilian to 'open the books' or get you a union card. There weren't many freer markets than the one for crack. All you needed was some cocaine, baking soda, a 9-millimeter automatic pistol or an Uzi, and enough balls to hold your corner. This was a new kind of Murder, Inc., and everyone seemed to be in the line of fire — not merely bystanders, innocent and otherwise, but also witnesses, potential witnesses, protected witnesses, even cops. I remember stories of teenage gangsters who had prepaid for their funerals, that they might go out with the proper pomp and respect, like something out of a vintage mob movie. Perhaps the stories were only apocryphal. But they had the ring of truth, or rather, in places like Brownsville and East New York, the ring of cinematic reality. By now, Al Pacino's Scarface had become a kind of documentary, a how-to primer on being a gangster. In the Seventy-Fifth Precinct, mothers put their children to bed in bathtubs, fearing stray shots that came through the windows after dark. *** On just such a night in the summer of '87, the blue Rolls made an encore appearance in the neighborhood, rolling up Sutter Avenue from Brownsville to East New York, past the beleaguered Seventy-Fifth Precinct toward the Cypress Hills projects. It had to be around 10:00 p.m. 8 Mike Tyson tries on a new outfit while shopping in Atlantic City in 1987. Getty Images Brian Gibbs, known as 'Glaze,' remembers standing outside his mother's apartment at 1266 Sutter and being dressed for work: jeans, a baseball jersey (likely the Cardinals) over his Kevlar vest, and a 9-millimeter Taurus in his waistband. He had recently been released after thirteen months in Rikers and the Brooklyn House of Detention, the case against him — the murder of a woman Gibbs suspected of robbing one of his drug spots — having fallen apart after he bribed a witness $25,000 not to testify. Now he was clearing $40,000 a day as the boss of his own crew, 'M and M,' short for 'money and murder.' Beyond that, though, what made Glaze Gibbs one of most feared men in New York was his position as 'security chief' for two guys he'd met in prison, Fat Cat Nichols and Pappy Mason. Glaze was just starting to make his rounds when he saw the blue Rolls coming slowly, deliberately, almost trolling its way up Sutter. The windows were down, Uzis dangling from the passenger side. It wasn't a prudent or professional move. Rather, it was someone who wanted to be seen. Just as Gibbs asked himself, Who the f–k is this?, a murmur swept through Cypress. Yo, that's Mike Tyson's car! That's Mike Tyson! 'Tyson wanted people to know he was around,' says Gibbs. 'He wanted to make a statement.' Tyson wasn't a gangster, but he loved hanging out with those who were, some of them old friends. What's more, he was conspicuously generous to them. They wanted me to be a hero, but I wanted to be a villain. Mike Tyson There were two ways, Gibbs was told, that Tyson would help out a Brooklyn guy with the proper rep. First, in jail, he'd break off some cash and have it put in your commissary account. Second, in death. Tyson paid for a lot of funerals in those years, many of them at the Lawrence H. Woodward Funeral Home, 1 Troy Avenue, Bedford-Stuyvesant, which turned out to be as frequently surveilled by cops as Midnight Rose's had been half a century earlier. Tyson even went so far as to bankroll one old friend's crack operation: 'Five thousand here, twenty thousand there, just so that he didn't have to work for someone else. I wasn't a partner and I never wanted any return from my investment.' 'He wanted to be like us,' Gibbs says of Tyson. 'Mike wanted to be down.' And he was. The era had its own signposts, its own distorted frame of reference: the glorification of gangster pictures, Mafia tropes, and automatic weapons. More important, though, was its soundtrack. Tyson was in Spofford when he first heard 'Rapper's Delight.' Hip-hop quickly evolved from mere braggadocio to a reflection of life on the streets. He was sequestered in Catskill when Grandmaster Flash released 'The Message,' a percussive allegory about a stickup kid turned jailhouse punk and found hanged to death in his cell. 'Those was our people — all the criminals and thieves,' Tyson would recall of the genre's early years. 'We all listened to hip-hop: the moneymakers … the killers the robbers. All the f–king street urchins. We all listened.' 8 Mike Tyson poses for a portrait in 1988. The Ring Magazine via Getty Imag By 1987, the vernacular and imagery had changed again. Boogie Down Productions released Criminal Minded, a seminal hip-hop album that featured KRS-One and Scott La Rock (who'd die by gunfire just weeks after the Tyson-Tucker fight) with an arsenal on the cover. References to Uzis and 9-millimeters became common, including the inaugural hit from Public Enemy, eponymously titled 'Public Enemy No. 1': 'I'll show you my gun, my Uzi weighs a ton / Because I'm Public Enemy number one.' Gibbs remembers the cut fondly. It was a Friday on D block, eighth floor of the Brooklyn House. 'Yo, Glaze,' inmates started yelling, 'did you hear that?' Walter 'King Tut' Johnson — also from Cypress, famous for robbing at gunpoint three hundred members of his own mother's church — had called into WBLS during Mr. Magic's Rap Attack and dedicated the song to Gibbs. Coincidentally or not, the single also contained hip-hop's first lyrical reference — as best I can tell — to Tyson: 'I can go solo, like a Tyson bolo.' *** Never mind that neither Chuck D nor anyone else had ever seen Tyson throw a bolo punch. Tyson had now entered the zeitgeist in a way that hadn't been scripted by a white man. For a couple of years, Tyson had been promised as a successor to Dempsey, Louis, and Marciano. Surrounded by white ethnics in his camp, he was seen as safe. But Public Enemy — whose logo featured a man posing B-boy style in the crosshairs of a rifle scope — was not. 'Here's a rap group that doesn't aim to — or have a chance of — crossing over,' Daniel Brogan wrote in the Chicago Tribune. 'They're raw and confrontational, just the sort of thing that frightens programmers of every ilk.' Or would it? Hip-hop would change the market itself. Hip hop wanted a Sonny Liston. Whatever Tyson looked like to network executives or that guy with a VFW cap in the Latham Coliseum, he was something else entirely refracted through the prism of hip-hop. 'The moment was right for Tyson just like it was right for Dempsey,' says Merchant. 'Dempsey didn't become the Jack Dempsey of story and song until after World War I. Then a heavyweight champion suddenly materializes from our Wild West, with that rip-roaring style, fighting in places like Montana. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. But the same way all the dots connected for Dempsey, they connected for Tyson with Black inner-city culture. The street guys adopted him. They got Mike Tyson.' America was at the cusp of a bull market for bad guys. Merchant didn't comprehend this so fully at the time — nor did anyone at HBO. Ditto Jacobs and Cayton. 'They wanted me to be a hero,' recalls Tyson, 'but I wanted to be a villain.' There was only one man who had any real feel for what Tyson actually wanted, or how it would play. 'Don King,' says Merchant. 'King sensed Tyson could be bigger than big.' Mark Kriegel, a former sports columnist for the New York Post and the Daily News, is a boxing analyst and essayist for ESPN. He is the author of Namath: A Biography, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich and The Good Son: The Life of Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini.
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HBO's new show looks like a dream (or nightmare) for true crime fans
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. It can sometimes get lost in the noise generated by huge prestige shows like The Last of Us, which just finished its second season, but HBO doesn't just make huge fictional series for people to follow. It's also a great producer of documentaries, which are often just as influential and riveting to watch. If you're a true crime fan (and untold millions of people are, at this point), then you might want to pay attention to the show it just unveiled, which will come to HBO and its once again renamed streaming platform HBO Max on 1 June – The Mortician. It just got its first trailer, and it's an interesting watch. This is a limited series which doesn't aim to take up your time for weeks on end. In fact, it'll only run for three episodes in total. That doesn't the show doesn't have a lot to offer up, though. It looks like a pretty chilling examination of the psychology of one particular criminal, with testimony from his victims but also from the man himself. Cremation can be a solemn act that plays a part in the cycle of remembrance, but it also involves a lot of trust in a mortician to do the job right. It transpires that back in the 1980s David Sconce was one of these morticians, but he was eventually discovered to be doing his job not just badly, but criminally. Image 1 of 5 Image 2 of 5 Image 3 of 5 Image 4 of 5 Image 5 of 5 Sconce was accused by his clients of ignoring their wishes, performing mass cremations instead of individual ones. This saved him a large amount of time and money, but was fairly obviously a huge act of disrespect, as well as a professional lie – and it looks like it eventually got him caught. That said, the trailer hints that he also got up to far more unbelievable exploits, too. With access to Sconce himself in interviews, as well as his victims and those who investigated him, this looks like a comprehensive recap of the almost unbelievable story of what he did. He presumably participated in the hope of exonerating himself to some degree, but in the trailer he mostly comes across terribly. Diverse content like this is what makes HBO Max (or Sky Atlantic and Now here in the UK) one of the best streaming platforms out there – add it to your watchlist if you think you could get a kick out of it in June.
