Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye has signed on to Trey Edward Shults’ untitled new picture. The film will team the musician with rising star Jenna Ortega and Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan. Shults will direct from a script he penned with Tesfaye and producing partner Reza Fahim. Tesfaye, Fahim, Kevin Turen and Harrison Kreiss are producing with Shultz and Ortega exec producing.
There are no details yet offered for the in-production feature. Shults has quickly made a name for himself via a handful of wrenching melodramas. Unless this new project is a major change of pace, audiences can expect the filmmaker behind “Krisha,” “It Comes at Night” and “Waves” to provide spectacular performances, an emotional workout and a relatively unhappy ending.
Chayse Irvin will serve as Director of Photography while Daniel Lopatin (also known as OPN) will provide the score alongside The Weeknd. He previously scored “Good Times” and “Uncut Gems” — the latter of which featured a cameo by The Weeknd playing a loose, unglamorous variation of himself.
Keoghan has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “The Banshees of Inisherin,” while recently winning a BAFTA for the same role. His prior high-profile credits include “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” “Eternals,” “Dunkirk” and a brief cameo as The Joker in “The Batman.” He will next be seen in “Saltburn,” which is Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning “Promising Young Woman.”
Ortega is one of Hollywood’s brightest new would-be stars. She has been acting for a decade, first appearing as the Vice President’s daughter in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in “Iron Man 3.” She racked up a slew of high-profile credits in the last few years in films like “The Babysitter: Killer Queen,” “Yes Day,” “The Fallout,” “X” and “Scream” (aka “Scream 5”). She became something of a generational icon via her performance as Wednesday Adams in the Tim Burton-directed Netflix episodic “Wednesday,” which became one of the streaming giant’s most-watched pieces of content ever.
She next appears in “Scream VI” where Paramount presumably didn’t repeat the mistake of “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” during which they killed off Channing Tatum in the opening scenes only to watch Tatum soar to stardom in “21 Jump Street,” “The Vow” and “Magic Mike” the prior year.