The Weeknd calls Rolling Stone's exposé on The Idol "ridiculous"

As the Cannes premiere of HBO’s controversial series The Idol looms large, its creator Abel Tesfaye—also known by his stage name The Weeknd—has offered more comments on the explosive March Rolling Stone report that alleged discord and toxicity behind the scenes, not to mention a wildly expensive vision that one production team member said amounted to a “rape fantasy.”

Since Rolling Stone’s report dropped in March, Tesfaye—as well as his co-creator Sam Levinson and star Lily-Rose Depp—has staunchly defended the series, even goading Rolling Stone publicly on Twitter. In a new interview with Vanity Fair’s Dan Adler, Tesfaye is still singing the same tune, and again asserts that there’s a much less sordid explanation behind the series’ big budget, extensive reshoots (as he argues: “Shows get reshot every day”), and creative direction.

For what it’s worth, Tesfaye doesn’t seem to have any regrets about the Rolling Stone callout he posted on Twitter shortly after the report landed. In the clip—which Tesfaye shared alongside a caption tagging Rolling Stone and asking “Did we upset you?”—his The Idol character Tedros clicks his tongue at the idea of wasting Jocelyn’s time with an “irrelevant” Rolling Stone spread. According to Tesfaye, he simply chose to give back what he got.

“I thought the article was ridiculous,” Tesfaye says. “I wanted to give a ridiculous response to it.”

Tesfaye also directly addresses the statement that The Idol’s initial director, Amy Seimetz, was “set up to fail,” and that he and Levinson’s vision of the series diametrically opposed hers. (Levinson, who commented on the story via an email, chalked the eleventh-hour redirection up to necessity, sharing: “HBO had dedicated a tremendous amount of autonomy and financial resources to the show, and it wasn’t working.”)

“I actually really loved working with Amy,” Tesfaye says, “and I’m sure she’s reading all this being like, Why am I being thrown into this?” (The A.V. Club has reached out to representatives for Seimetz for comment.)

Finally, Tesfaye objects to Rolling Stone’s reports that rewrites on the series robbed Lily-Rose Depp’s character of whatever autonomy she initially had, adding up to that damning “rape fantasy” descriptor. For what it’s worth, Depp has also defended the show, previously calling Levinson “the best director” she’s “ever worked with.” Per Vanity Fair, Tesfaye describes Depp as the series’ “third creator.”

“I want to leave people the opportunity to be surprised,” Depp tells Vanity Fair. “I think it’s interesting that people have so much to say about the show already and they haven’t even seen it.”

The Idol lands on HBO on June 4.