The Weeknd hits back at Rolling Stone report that said his series ‘The Idol’ is in turmoil

‘Blinding Lights’ hitmaker The Weeknd has taken cognisance of a recent report by Rolling Stone on his upcoming series and has responded.

The music star responded to a report from Rolling Stone claiming that his upcoming series ‘The Idol’ created with ‘Euphoria’s’ Sam Levinson, has “gone wildly, disgustingly off the rails”, reports ‘Variety’.

Posting a clip from the series to Instagram, Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye tagged Rolling Stone and wrote, “Did we upset you?” In the scene, a character played by Dan Levy pitches Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp’s pop star character Jocelyn to do a photo shoot for the cover of Rolling Stone. Tesfaye, who plays a modern-day cult leader named Tedros, says, “Rolling Stone? Aren’t they a little irrelevant? … Rolling Stone has 6 million followers on Instagram, half of them probably bots. And Jocelyn has 78 million followers, all real I’d assume. So she does a photo shoot, she tags them, they get her followers. More money for Rolling Stone, nothing for Jocelyn.”

“There’s a lot for Jocelyn,” Levy’s character says, to which Tesfaye’s character responds, “Not in Rolling Stone”.

When asked for comment, Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman pointed to his Twitter reply to Tesfaye, saying: “Not at all!” when asked “Did we upset you?”

As per ‘Variety’, HBO is also disputing Rolling Stone’s story, titled ‘The Idol’: How HBO’s Next ‘Euphoria’ Became Twisted ‘Torture Porn’, which claims that the show is in turmoil due to a poor working environment, last-minute script rewrites and budgetary issues.

‘The Idol’ first showed signs of trouble when director Amy Seimetz suddenly exited the show in April 2022 with several of the six episodes already completed. ‘Variety’ reported last year that the series would be overhauled “with changes to its cast and crew – due to a change in creative directions”.

Reports at the time claimed that Tesfaye felt the series was leaning too much into a “female perspective”.

As Rolling Stone reports, Levinson then took over as director, “scrapping the nearly-finished $54-75 million project to rewrite and reshoot the entire thing”. Los Angeles, March 2 (IANS)