Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- How The Weeknd went from a homeless high school dropout to the world’s most popular artist—with a little help from Drake.
- The Grammy winner has a car collection worth millions.
- Now focusing more on his acting career, The Weeknd says fellow Canadian Jim Carrey sparked his desire to perform.
Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd, is making his big-screen debut as a lead actor. The Grammy-winning singer plays a fictionalized version of himself in the new movie Hurry Up Tomorrow, in which his character goes on an existential odyssey after losing his voice on stage. The psychological thriller comes just months after the release of his latest album of the same name, which will serve as the movie’s soundtrack.
“The film came first. The album didn’t exist. We were scoring and writing music to picture,” he told Billboard in April. “The idea came from a real-life incident that had happened, and I always saw it as a film.” The project is a long time coming for the 35-year-old, who always wanted to pursue a career in cinema.
Before hitting the top of the charts with hits like “Blinding Lights” and “Save Your Tears,” The Weeknd had to work his way up from the bottom. “It was tough growing up where I was from,” the Toronto-born artist explained to Variety in 2020. “I really thought film was gonna be my way out, but I couldn’t really make a movie to feel better, you know? Music was very direct therapy; it was immediate, and people liked it. It definitely saved my life.”
With six studio albums, seven No. 1 Billboard hits, and four Grammy Awards under his belt, he is among the top-selling artists in the world. Here’s what else you should know about the singer.
The Weeknd is multilingual
The son of Ethiopian immigrants, The Weeknd grew up outside Toronto in a multicultural neighborhood filled with fellow East Africans, as well as people from India, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. “Ethiopian—Amharic—was the first language I learned to form sentences in because my grandma, who raised me with my mom, would not speak English,” he told Variety. “Because of television and being in Canada, I learned English too, but I went to French-immersion school, where you’d get in trouble for speaking English, and I couldn’t speak it to my grandma, so it’s almost like English is my third language, even though now it’s my first.”
Jim Carrey fueled his career as a performer
The Weeknd also told Variety that fellow Ontario native Jim Carrey’s 1994 comedy The Mask was the first movie his single mother, Samra Tesfaye, took him to see in theaters when he was 4 years old. “It blew me away,” he said, adding that it fueled his dream of one day attending film school. Nearly three decades later, the men were introduced over text, and The Weeknd invited Carrey to his Los Angeles condo to hear some new music in 2019.
As it turned out, not only did they discover that they lived in the same neighborhood—and even got out telescopes to wave to each other—but Carrey also knew the exact theater his mother took him to see The Mask. “On my [30th] birthday, he called and told me to look out my window, and on his balcony he had these giant red balloons, and he picked me up and we went to breakfast,” The Weeknd recalled. “It was surreal. Jim Carrey was my first inspiration to be any kind of performer, and I went to breakfast with him on my first day of being 30.”
He dropped out of high school
After switching schools several times, The Weeknd eventually dropped out of high school when he was 17, also persuading his best friend La Mar Taylor to join him. The pair, along with another friend, Hyghly Alleyne, decided to move into a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood and embraced a drug-filled “no rules” lifestyle. He recalls his mother giving him “the worst look anyone could ever have,” as he dragged his mattress out of their home. “She looked at me like she had failed,” he told The New York Times in July 2015.
Later admitting to Rolling Stone that he still feels insecure when “talking to someone educated,” he says he began doing crossword puzzles to improve his vocabulary.
A brush with the law inspired him to get serious about his future
After he and his high school pals were evicted from their $850-per-month apartment, The Weeknd admitted he told various girls he loved them so he’d have a place to stay. “There was, like, three girls that thought legit that I was their boyfriend,” he explained to The New York Times.
Spending nights in jail when he was about 18 forced him to “smarten up, to focus,” he later told The Guardian. “A lot of people don’t get that second chance. But around that age, you usually get one second chance after a slap on the wrist. And you either take the experience and think, ‘This is it, final straw,’ or you don’t.”
An American Apparel job paid his bills while he made music
Before he made it big, The Weeknd worked in retail. Around 2010, he was folding shirts at an American Apparel store in downtown Toronto. It was around this time that the singer began making music with the intent of selling it to other musicians. His coworkers would listen to his tracks while they worked without even realizing it was him singing them.
The singer initially wanted to spell his stage name differently
There are competing narratives about how the singer became The Weeknd. During a 2013 Reddit AMA, he revealed he “hated” his given name and, in his late teens, decided to use the moniker “The Weekend,” instead, because it “sounded cool.” There was one problem, however: A Canadian rock band already had the name, so Tesfaye removed the “e” to avoid copyright issues.
According to music producer Jeremy Rose, however, he and his fellow musician used “The Weekend” as a collective name. Rose says the singer dropped the “e” after the former collaborators had a falling out in 2010.
Whatever the case, the singer is now reverting back to his birth name. “I think I’ve overcome every challenge as this persona,” he told Variety in January.
Drake helped launch his career
Drake initially introduced the then-little-known singer to his fanbase in 2010 by posting two of the fellow Canadian artist’s songs on his October’s Very Own blog. After the musicians met in 2011 while The Weeknd was promoting his debut mixtape, Drake asked him to appear on his future hit “Crew Love.”
In 2012, Drake described their close relationship to MTV. “We’re definitely a family,” the rapper said. “It’s definitely a Toronto thing.” He was there for his friend again when The Recording Academy snubbed The Weeknd’s album After Hours in the 2021 Grammy nominations.
His trademark former hairstyle was a pain—literally
The Weeknd says his former trademark dreadlocks, which was inspired by painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, caused him to sometimes wake up with neck pain. He kept the style anyway so that he didn’t end up looking “like everyone else,” also wanting to be remembered as “iconic and different.” In October 2015, he told Rolling Stone that he’d “probably cut it” if it started to interfere with his sight, however.
He eventually lopped his hair off in late 2016, debuting his new short-haired look on the album artwork for Starboy. “I think I felt a single tear come down my cheek,” he later joked in an interview with The Guardian. The upside to his new ’do? He could now wear baseball caps to blend into the crowd.
He was named the world’s most popular artist
In February 2023, The Weeknd made history as the first musician to reach 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify. In honor of the record-breaking feat, he was named the most popular artist in the world by Guinness World Records the following month. While multiple artists have since surpassed this Spotify record, The Weeknd still maintains the title.
His car collection is worth as much as $5 million
Not only does he own the $1.2 million orange McLaren P1 seen in his “Starboy” music video, but the ride is only one part of his impressive car collection, reportedly worth around $4 to $5 million. His other vehicles include: a Porsche 911 Carrera, a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, a Bentley Mulsanne, and Mercedes-Benz AMG GT, among others. His former Los Angeles mansion, which he sold to Madonna in April 2021, even included a custom mirror-floored auto gallery garage that could switch between purple, blue, and green neon lighting.
Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
