'The Idol' at Cannes: Lily-Rose Depp, the Weeknd, nudity and controversy

July 20, 2024

CANNES, France — The party for the world premiere of “The Idol,” the long-delayed and controversy-plagued music-industry drama about the dark side of fame premiering soon on HBO HBO Max Max, starring Lily-Rose Depp and Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye, could have been a scene out of the miniseries itself.

Monday night’s rager had everything: a crowded mega club; deafeningly loud music; Depp’s taut abs on full display; Tesfaye commanding the DJ booth while his enraptured faithful looked upon him; heaping mounds of caviar, a spoonful of which would be placed on guests’ hands, so they could lick it off, then chase it with a shot of vodka; and famous people being watched by the unfamous while pretending not to be aware that every cellphone camera in the room was recording their every move.

Yeah, it was weird.

The series, created by Tesfaye, “Euphoria” mastermind Sam Levinson and producer Reza Fahim, follows Depp’s troubled pop star, Jocelyn (who seems to be somewhat inspired by Britney Spears), as she falls under the thrall of Tesfaye’s ridiculously named cult leader, Tedros Tedros, while trying to revive her career. Jocelyn is surrounded by people who treat her like a commodity, and she struggles with her mental health. She wants to be seen and understood while willingly opting into a zoolike existence where she performs the role of pop star — which seemed to pretty much sum up the slightly disturbing vibe just under the surface of the party.

Behind-the-scenes d-r-a-m-a has dominated everything we knew about the six-episode series, which was announced in 2021 and has gone through personnel changes and release-date delays to become one of the messiest and most intriguing production fiascos in recent memory.

How so? Well, in April 2022, director Amy Seimetz (co-creator of “The Girlfriend Experience”) left the show, reportedly having shot about 80 percent of it, at the expense of a rumored $75 million. Tesfaye had felt that the series was good, but not great. “HBO and the producers felt that, even though there was potential in version one, the show just didn’t land,” Tesfaye said, diplomatically, in press notes. At his behest, Levinson came on as the new director, tasked with re-hauling the cast, crew and script. Other than Depp and Tesfaye, only three other featured cast members remain the same as in Version 1. Then, in March, Rolling Stone released an explosive report in which multiple sources talked about the “chaotic” set Levinson had been running and how the vision had turned from a satire of fame and a story of a woman finding herself sexually to “rape fantasy” and “torture porn.”

Asked about the allegations at a Tuesday afternoon news conference, Levinson said: “We know we’re making a show that’s provocative; that’s not lost on us. … When my wife read me the article, I looked at her and I just said, ‘I think we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer.’”

“The Idol,” a TV series starring Lily-Rose Depp and Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 23. (Video: Reuters)

As the guy behind the Zendaya-starring megahit “Euphoria,” about California teens battling drug addiction and abuse, Levinson has earned the right for some leeway from HBO, er, Max, to see whether he can hit the youth-culture lightning twice. While “Euphoria” is beloved, Levinson is less so, criticized by some as being a nepo baby (his father is “Rain Man” director Barry Levinson) and by others as someone who provokes for provocation’s sake.

As for Levinson’s prediction that the show will be huge, he may have a point.

It made it into Cannes, which says something, coming from a festival that rarely premieres TV shows unless they’re from auteur directors such as David Lynch (the “Twin Peaks” revival in 2017) or Jane Campion (“Top of the Lake,” that same year).

Whether Levinson deserves to be in their company, not to mention that of the other filmmakers featured in the official selection this year, such as Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson and Hirokazu Kore-eda, is something you can debate in your WhatsApp groups in two weeks. Levinson himself was so choked up during the standing ovation at the premiere that he could barely get out any words. “Being at the Cannes Film Festival has been the biggest dream of my life. … I love you guys,” he said, as Tesfaye and Depp leaned in to give him hugs.

Depp, too, seems poised to jump into a new stratosphere of stardom. She has insane cheekbones and a charisma that is endlessly mesmerizing, and Levinson seems to know what he has on his hands. He opens the series with a close-up of Jocelyn acting out being “vulnerable” and “innocent” for a photographer (they seemed like the same face, to be honest), then pulls back the camera to reveal she’s in a red satin robe, open at the chest and barely covering her nipples, save for the miracle of some double-sided tape. Jocelyn turns out to be very #freethenipple; Depp’s areolae — or the clothed outlines of them — seem to appear in 50 percent of the scenes in the first two episodes.

She wants to show off her body for her music video, but it turns out she signed an intimacy clause meant to protect her. A fast and funny exchange follows, with Jocelyn’s co-managers, Chaim (Hank Azaria, doing an Israeli accent in 2023) and Destiny (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), debating with her creative director, Xander (Troye Sivan), publicist (Dan Levy) and music label exec Nikki (Jane Adams) about whether she should have bodily autonomy or whether that’s too much of a liability — all while trying to steer a Vanity Fair reporter (Hari Nef) away from various disasters.

Chaim ends up locking the intimacy coordinator in a bathroom.

If those first 30 minutes, with their wry “West Wing”-rapid one-liners about whether mental illness is sexy and whether the internet could just stop policing women’s bodies, carried through the entire series, it might well be the sharp satire of fame it seems to want to be. But enter Tesfaye’s character, Tedros, midway through the first episode. He has a rattail and the world’s worst wig, and it is somewhat baffling how any woman could find that attractive. Rachel Sennott’s character, Leia, Jocelyn’s anxious assistant and paid best friend, calls him “rape-y,” and Jocelyn replies, “That’s why I like him.”

So, is the series torture porn-y? Yes. A lot.

Jocelyn and Tedros hook up in the stairwell of the club he runs (which doubles as his sex-cult headquarters during the day), and he starts to choke her, before a worried Leia comes looking for Jocelyn and interrupts them. Among other kinks, he wraps her robe over her face, ties the belt around her neck, nearly suffocates her, then cuts a hole in the cloth and has her sing out of it. She enthusiastically debuts her “new sound,” filled with recorded tracks of her orgasming, to her team the next day. Then, as Tedros ghosts her, she must try to re-create the danger of their encounters through choking herself while masturbating in a way that leaves her inner thighs covered in gashes.

As a creator of the series, Tesfaye said in the news conference that he wanted to make “a dark, twisted fairy tale about the music industry and everything I know about it, and heighten it and take inspiration from films that both me and Sam love.” Asked who inspired the character, Tesfaye responded, “I mean, the first thing I can think about is Dracula.”

Feel free to laugh at the dramatic moments when Tesfaye’s shadowy figure shows up at the gate to Jocelyn’s estate. “When the gate opens, I couldn’t tell if everyone in the theater was laughing, because me and Sam and Lily were laughing really hard at that,” said Tesfaye in the news conference. Levinson said he wanted Tedros to be someone with the same ambition to be a great musician as Tesfaye, but with none of the talent. “I can’t imagine how frustrating that would be, and the darkness that it would create inside of him,” Levinson said, “because he can’t realize this on his own, and so it forces him to find a puppet, so to speak.”

In the news conference, Depp said that she felt deeply involved in creating the character, and that all the nudity was deliberate. “She’s a born-and-bred performer, and I think that that extends to every aspect of her life, not just her professional life,” Depp said. “I think that the way that she dresses, for example, is her trying to tell you something all the time.” Levinson said he sees Jocelyn wearing, for example, a bikini that is just a tiny strap of fabric covering her nipples as her way of testing how people underestimate her. “It’s what attracts an audience. It’s what attracts an imagination,” he said. “I think it’s very true to what almost every pop star is doing these days.”

And also, perhaps, what Levinson is doing as a director. Was the set hectic? Yes, said Azaria in the news conference. Sometimes they didn’t know whose costumes were where or what was going to happen in the scene. Sometimes it felt as if the series was being written on the fly, but that was part of an “unbelievably creative” process that took getting used to but that “revitalized my joy in the filmmaking process,” he said.

“It’s a little sad and disheartening to see false things said about somebody that you really care about and that you know is not like that,” Depp added. “That wasn’t reflective at all of my experience shooting the show.”

As for Levinson, he said that reading accusations about himself felt “completely foreign to me.” But he could either be trying to manage his persona and project an image that the public approved of, or he could take a lesson from Jocelyn and slowly learn to care less. “Managing a persona is not interesting to me, because it takes away the time and energy that I would spend on the work,” he said. “And so, you know, they’re free to write whatever they want.”

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