- Lily-Rose Depp said she would sometimes avoid The Weeknd when he was in character on set of "The Idol."
- The Weeknd plays club-owning cult leader Tedros, who manipulates pop star Jocelyn.
Lily-Rose Depp said that she would often avoid her "Idol" costar Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye while filming the show because he was too "in the zone."
"I don't think anybody went full method — nobody lost their minds," Depp told Entertainment Weekly. "Well, sometimes when Abel would get — I don't want to reveal too much about where Abel's character goes, but when he would be in full Tedros mode sometimes, I would steer clear of him. I'd be like, 'He's in his zone right now.'"
"The Idol" follows Depp as Jocelyn, a pop starlet looking to elevate her fame to the next level, who meets Tedros, a club-owning cult leader, played by Tesfaye.
The hotly anticipated Sam Levinson-helmed HBO show is set to take over the coveted 9 p.m. spot vacated by "Succession," but early reviews have come down hard on its "tawdry cliches," calling it "the stuff of a toxic man's fantasy."
Earlier this year, Rolling Stone spoke to more than a dozen members of "The Idol" crew, who said they were made uncomfortable by the direction Levinson took the show after its original director, Amy Seimetz departed.
Tesfaye had reportedly complained that the show under Seimetz contained too much of the "female perspective."
However when Levinson was brought on, several staffers complained that his new scripts contained "torture porn" and "rape fantasies."
A production member told the outlet: "What I signed up for was a dark satire of fame and the fame model in the 21st century. The things that we subject our talent and stars to, the forces that put people in the spotlight and how that can be manipulated in the post-Trump world. It went from satire to the thing it was satirizing."
For her part, Depp insisted the on-set atmosphere was "quite lighthearted."
"We're all really good friends and we all are similar people and really understand each other," she told EW. "We were having a lot of laughs, listening to a lot of music, dancing around, and that kind of energy is what made the heavier moments easier and possible, because whenever you knew that there was a bigger, emotional scene coming up, you felt like you were surrounded by people that you feel comfortable with, people that have your back, and you feel that in the show."