In recent years, the ‘visual album’ has become a part of many a musician’s album cycle. From Beyoncé’s Lemonade, to Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer,
In recent years, the ‘visual album’ has become a part of many a musician’s album cycle. From Beyoncé’s Lemonade, to Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, to Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, those projects tend to be lavish, thematic affairs that largely exist as super-sized album-length music videos. Hurry Up Tomorrow is not that. Sure, the latest album from Canadian mega-star The Weeknd – aka Abel Tesfaye – is also called Hurry Up Tomorrow. But his film of the same name, while linked to the album, isn’t a visual album project – it’s a full-on psychological thriller feature film, directed by Waves’ Trey Edward Shults, in which Tesfaye plays an alternative version of himself.
“It’s kinda like Raging Bull and Persona meets Purple Rain,” explains Shults, who wrote the film alongside Tesfaye and Reza Fahim. The film was inspired, in part, by an incident that Tesfaye experienced on stage at LA’s SoFi Stadium, at the end of his 2022 tour, when his voice completely gave out. Later, he learned that there was nothing physically wrong with his vocal cords – and what he experienced was psychological in nature. “I think it was a test,” Tesfaye tells Empire. “What happens if this thing that you’re relying on too much is taken away from you?” It not only helped inspire Hurry Up Tomorrow, but marked a turning point in his entire conception of ‘The Weeknd’. “I think that I needed that experience, on the biggest stage of my career, because that way I couldn’t ignore it,” he says.
The result is a film that holds up a dim inverted mirror to Tesfaye’s own experience with fame. “The main character’s name is Abel. It’s very much implied that this is The Weeknd,” Shults explains. “But the Abel you see in the movie is not the Abel I know personally. It’s drawing on personal things that he’s wrestled with his entire life, imagining if he’d surrounded himself with the wrong people and made some wrong choices.” Enter Jenna Ortega’s Ani, set to challenge everything Abel thinks he knows. “She’s the feminine side of Abel. The sweet side,” Ortega teases. “He’s been neglecting his anima [the female part of himself] and has no understanding of what that is in his life because ever since he went on to live this life as a musician, he felt pressured to be something else.” Get ready, then, for far more than a mega-length music video: it’s time to see The Weeknd like never before.
Read Empire’s full feature on Hurry Up Tomorrow – speaking to The Weeknd, Trey Edward Shults, Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan on their ambitious psychological thriller – in the Jaws At 50 issue, on sale Thursday 10 April. Pre-order a copy online here. Hurry Up Tomorrow comes to UK cinemas from 16 May.
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