Months before it had even come out, The Idol was the year’s most controversial TV show. In March, Rolling Stone published an exposé featuring anonymous interviews with those working on the Lily-Rose Depp-starring HBO show, who alleged that its producers – megastar musician Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, who also plays a lecherous nightclub owner/cult leader called Tedros, and Euphoria’s Sam Levinson – had burned through time and money to make a series “about a man who gets to abuse this woman and she loves it.”
Following a pop star named Jocelyn (Depp) as she tries to mount a career comeback after a mental breakdown, The Idol is self-consciously pulpy and undeniably sordid: characters talk about wanting to make “giant fucking big-titted hits”, lock intimacy coordinators in closets, and say over-the-top things such as: “Will you let people enjoy sex, drugs and hot girls? Stop trying to cockblock America.” Depp spends much of the first episode topless, and the series is littered with allusions to contentious cult auteurs such as Paul Verhoeven and Gaspar Noé. When the first two episodes premiered at Cannes earlier this month, critics slammed it as a “toxic man’s fantasy”; for a moment, its Rotten Tomatoes rating was hovering around an almost unheard-of 9% (it now sits at 25%).
Veteran actor Jane Adams says that “everyone’s delighted there’s an intense response to the show”. Known for her Emmy-nominated turn in Hacks, Adams plays entertainingly nasty music executive Nikki in The Idol and provides much of the comic relief, including the line about “big-titted hits”. “The response is just what everyone expected,” she says, “and we’ve all had a good laugh about it.”
The critics have one thing right: The Idol is certainly seamy. There’s a voyeurism to the way Levinson shoots a lot of the sex scenes – including multiple masturbation scenes in which Depp’s character chokes herself – that creates an ominous, discomfiting feeling. Sometimes, the sex scenes are plainly embarrassing to watch.
According to Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who plays Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers alongside Hank Azaria, those decrying the show as misogynist “are making an incorrect assumption”. She says the five-parter takes “a complete turn” in its final three episodes, and that “what the viewer thinks is misogynistic is not exactly what it appears”. “I wouldn’t be part of a project if misogyny was all it was about.”
The show’s vision of sex, for better or for worse, does chime with 2023’s “candidly kinky sexual climate”, as the Face’s Brit Dawson put it earlier this month; whether you find the sexual content itself misogynistic will depend on how you view unconventional consensual sex acts, and whether you consider the show’s depiction of Jocelyn and Tedros’s toxic relationship dynamic an endorsement.
Hari Nef, a past Levinson collaborator who plays a Vanity Fair reporter in the show, says that while she found the first two episodes “a little shocking” (“I’m not used to seeing sex that explicit and that kinky with such an unwavering gaze on TV”) after Cannes, she was more able to “think about what Sam is doing and saying by including this”.
“I think Sam is reflecting porn culture back to its audience – the way women’s desires have been constituted post-porn, post-pop feminism, post-#MeToo,” she says. “It reflects a lot of conversations I’ve had with girls my age unpacking the desires of our generation and how they square with the core tenets of feminism and where we go from here.
“I’ve heard so many girls get really frank and say: ‘It felt like the most subversive thing I could crave was sex that not only didn’t involve me being strong, but involved me being disempowered,’” says Nef. “In Jocelyn, we get to peer into the psyche of a woman where that damage was done. Are they the desires and rules of the patriarchy? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want them.”
Indeed, a lot of reviews seem to resent Depp’s character for wearing skimpy clothes and taking an interest in sexual submission, zeroing in on those things in a way that suggests disbelief that anyone in the real world would make the same choices. In one such review for Variety, critic Peter Debruge points out Jocelyn’s “ultra-short, ultra-sheer party dress” – as if such styles aren’t currently available everywhere from PrettyLittleThing to Miu Miu – and wonders whether there were any “protections” for Depp given how often she has to wear skimpy clothing.
Adams says that by focusing solely on Jocelyn’s sexuality, critics are “missing a wonderful opportunity to praise an incredible woman that I had an incredible time working with”.
“I think a lot of people have their head right up their ass – honest to God, I really do,” she adds. “Everything becomes about politics and it’s boring. Sam’s a storyteller. Certain stories are upsetting or challenging. But are we going to censor them? I think they should be more aware of what they’re actually calling for. Just say it – say: ‘We would like to censor people.’ See how that goes.”
Randolph says she found the show deeply collaborative, while Depp has said multiple times that Levinson “is the best director I have ever worked with”. “Lily-Rose has stated explicitly that she felt safe, and that this is her work as much as anybody else,” says Nef. “If there’s an actress or actor who’s not comfortable with a role, don’t do it. Read the script, set your boundaries. Personally, I would act in a scene that was sexually abject or dangerous. I would do everything Lily-Rose did in this show.”
Levinson is a perpetual hot topic on Twitter, where he is often criticised for the sexualised way he portrays Euphoria’s young female characters. The Idol seems primed to provoke similar discourse; Levinson has already been slammed for a moment in the Cannes press conference in which, upon being asked how he orchestrated the show’s explicit sex scenes without going “too far”, he replied: “Sometimes things that might be revolutionary are taken too far.” Nef says: “Sam is looking directly at the beast in a way other directors aren’t. It’s cool to be a part of.”
“If anything,” says Randolph, “due to the fact that we were doing something more risqué, the climate around us all was one in which we were taken care of very well. We were asked for our ideas, it was very collaborative and creative. Sam didn’t come in with an ego.”
There is also another side to the show – one that focuses on the bizarre bureaucracy of the pop industry. Scenes in which, for example, a handful of Jocelyn’s handlers try to work out who leaked a racy photo of her on Twitter, and bicker over who has to tell her, are often genuinely funny – though the tonal shift between these moments and the 50 Shades-esque sex scenes can be jarring, like flicking from an episode of Veep to an episode of True Blood. “The Idol, while a drama, is also in so many ways a satire,” says Nef. “It almost feels like John Waters is looking over us in the sense that no one and nothing is safe from having his, her, its shit aired out.”
Rolling Stone’s report alleged that Amy Seimetz, The Idol’s original showrunner, was pushed out due to Tesfaye’s concern that the show was leaning too much into a “female perspective”. The entire series was then reshot with Levinson as showrunner – after which, some crew members say, the production began to descend into chaos, with communications allegedly breaking down between Levinson and HBO. “In the creative industry, there are creative differences all the time and things like what happened with the show happen,” says Adams, who worked with Seimetz on her 2020 film She Dies Tomorrow but says she hasn’t spoken with her about her exit from The Idol. “I look forward to working with Amy in the future – this experience doesn’t change that, and we are still friends.”
Nef says shooting The Idol “wasn’t any more or less chaotic than any shoot during the pandemic has been”. “They were dealing with the schedules of, like, three pop stars,” she says. “When you add that on to Sam’s day-to-day collaborative, loose style, in terms of improvisation and experimentation, there were definitely days where everybody was working extra hard to make the pieces come together.
“Maybe it’s easier if you’re just saying lines off the page, but that’s not Sam’s style,” she says. “I didn’t identify with the way that [Rolling Stone] article described everything. It felt very normal – as normal as a TV shoot can be. It’s always hard work and you never really know what’s coming around the corner, but that’s what showbiz is, babe. Get in or get out.”
Adams, who has worked with legends of subversive cinema such as Paul Schrader and Robert Altman, says that working with Levinson is “thrilling, because it feels just like them – it’s the same, except Sam is young, and now it’s his time. A lot of people can go their whole lives without working with somebody as brilliant as Sam.”
The Idol is on Sky Atlantic and Now from Monday 5 June.
