Abel Tesfaye

A punch in the bathroom of a New York nightclub opened the doors of film to Abel Tesfaye. It happened in 2019 during the shoot of Uncut Gems, where the Safdie brothers asked him to play a sweaty, arrogant past version of himself. That fight with Adam Sandler lasted barely three minutes on screen, but it set a clear statement of intent. Tesfaye didn't want to limit himself to writing songs for other people's soundtracks.

Her relationship with the camera always had an obsessive edge. From her first music videos in Toronto to the album After Hours in 2020, each phase worked like a serialized mini-movie with explicit references to Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg. He showed up on red carpets bandaged, bloodied or wearing grotesque facial prosthetics while photographers were looking for the pop singer. For him, music was just the visual cover for designing twisted fictions.

The artifice devoured the character.

The fiasco on the Côte d'Azur

In 2023 came the attempt to storm prestige television with The Idol for HBO. The production derailed long before its premiere, when original director Amy Seimetz walked off the set with eighty percent of the footage completed. Tesfaye took over creative control alongside Sam Levinson and rewrote the story to give more weight to his role, a sleazy nightclub owner named Tedros.

The Cannes Film Festival premiere drew a five-minute polite ovation and devastating reviews. The specialized press slammed the series for its pretentious tone and gratuitous excess. HBO canceled the production after airing just five episodes, closing a chaotic chapter that cost tens of millions of dollars in reshoots.

But the stumble didn't slow his drive to control the big screen.

The pop star's last escape

Instead of retreating after the TV fiasco, Tesfaye teamed up with director Trey Edward Shults to co-write and star in Hurry Up Tomorrow in 2025. The script grew out of a real breakdown: the night the singer lost his voice during a concert in Los Angeles in 2022. The film turned that panic attack into a claustrophobic psychological thriller alongside Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan.

The film dispensed with the crowd-pleasing formulas of standard music movies. Daniel Lopatin composed the score together with Tesfaye himself, aiming for a suffocating sonic texture that took months to find a buyer until Lionsgate took on theatrical distribution.

And the box office gamble was merciless.

The film cost fifteen million dollars in production budget. In its first weekend in U.S. theaters it earned 3.3 million dollars, and its final worldwide box office came to 7.8 million.